How Heretics Use Obscure Ancient Writers

This condemnation, in fact, seems to have been issued by Providence as though with a special view to the fraud of certain people. Scheming to dress up a heresy under a name not its own, they often get hold of the works of some ancient writer that are not very clearly expressed, and that, because their own teaching is so obscure, seem to agree with their doctrine. So they get the credit of being neither the first nor the only ones to have held it. This wickedness of theirs is, in my judgment, doubly hateful. First, because they are not afraid to invite others to drink the poison of heresy. Second, because with profane breath, as though fanning smoldering embers into flame, they blow on the memory of each holy man, and spread an evil report of what ought to be buried in silence by bringing it to notice again. In this they follow in the footsteps of their father Ham. He not only failed to cover the nakedness of the venerable Noah, but told the others about it so that they might laugh at it. In this he offended so gravely against the duty a son owes his father that even his descendants were caught up with him in the curse he brought down. How different were his blessed brothers! They would neither defile their own eyes by looking on their revered father’s nakedness nor let others do so, but, as the Scripture says, went in backward and covered him. That is, they neither approved nor exposed the fault of the holy man, and for this they were rewarded with a blessing on themselves and their descendants. [a]

But to return to the matter at hand. We ought, then, to have a great dread of the crime of perverting the faith and corrupting religion. We are held back from it not only by the church’s discipline but also by the rebuke of apostolic authority. For everyone knows how seriously, how severely, how forcefully the blessed apostle Paul attacks certain people who, with astonishing fickleness, had been “so soon removed from him who called them to the grace of Christ, to another gospel, which is not another”; who “had heaped up for themselves teachers to suit their own lusts, turning their ears away from the truth and being turned aside to fables”; “having condemnation, because they had cast off their first faith.” They had been deceived by those of whom the same apostle writes to the Christians at Rome: “Now I urge you, brothers, mark those who cause divisions and offenses contrary to the doctrine you have learned, and avoid them. For such people do not serve the Lord Christ, but their own belly, and by smooth words and fair speeches they deceive the hearts of the simple.” These are the people “who make their way into houses and lead captive foolish women loaded down with sins, led away by various lusts, always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth”; “idle talkers and deceivers, who overturn whole households, teaching things they ought not, for the sake of shameful gain”; “men of corrupt minds, rejected as to the faith”; “proud, knowing nothing, but obsessed with questions and quarrels about words, destitute of the truth, supposing that godliness is a means of gain”; “and at the same time learning to be idle, wandering about from house to house, and not only idle but gossips and busybodies, saying things they ought not”; “who, having put away a good conscience, have made shipwreck of the faith”; “whose profane and empty babblings advance to more ungodliness, and their word eats away like a cancer.” And well is it written of them: “But they will get no further, for their folly will be plain to all, as theirs also was.” [c]