Heresy and the Hydra of the Poets

The poets tell the story of the hydra of old. When its heads were cut off, it gained by its wounds and sprang up more abundantly. By a strange and unheard-of marvel, its loss turned into a kind of gain for the monster, which grew by its own death, while that astonishing fertility doubled whatever the executioner’s blade cut off. At last the man who was eagerly seeking to destroy it, toiling and sweating and finding his efforts baffled again and again by useless labor, added the arts of cunning to the courage of battle. By the use of fire, so they tell us, he cut off the many offspring of that monstrous body with a fiery sword. And so, when its inner parts were burned and the rebellious throbbing of that ghastly fertility was seared, those prodigious births came to an end at last. [a]

In the same way, heresies in the churches bear some likeness to that hydra the poets imagined. They too hiss against us with deadly tongues; they too spit out their deadly poison; and they too spring up again when their heads are cut off. But medicine must not be lacking when the disease revives, and the more dangerous the sickness, the speedier the remedy should be. So our Lord God is able to make true in the church’s warfare what pagan fictions imagined about the death of the hydra. He can let the fiery sword of the Holy Spirit sear the inner parts of this most dangerous brood, so that the new heresy may be put down and its monstrous fertility may at last stop answering to its dying throbs.