Heraclitus Behind Noetus

These are the contents of the ninth book of the Refutation of All Heresies.

What the blasphemous folly of Noetus is, and that he gave himself to the doctrines of Heraclitus the Obscure and not to those of Christ. And how Callistus mixed the heresy of Cleomenes, the pupil of Noetus, with the heresy of Theodotus, and so put together another and newer heresy; and what sort of life this man led. What the recent arrival at Rome was of the strange spirit Elchasai, and that his apparent attachment to the law served to hide his own errors, when in fact he gives himself to the doctrines of the Gnostics, or even of the astrologers, and to the arts of sorcery. What the customs of the Jews are, and how many differences of opinion there are among them.

We have now carried on a long contest over all the heresies, and we, at any rate, have left none of them unrefuted; but the greatest struggle is still ahead of us. It is to give an account of the heresies that have sprung up in our own day, and to refute them. By these, certain ignorant and presumptuous men have tried to scatter the church, and have brought the greatest confusion on all the faithful throughout the whole world. For it seems best that we should make our attack on the opinion that is the source from which the evils of our own time come, and prove what its first principles are, so that its offshoots may become common knowledge and be held in contempt by everyone. [c]

A man named Noetus has appeared, a native of Smyrna by birth. He brought in a heresy taken from the doctrines of Heraclitus. A certain man called Epigonus became his servant and pupil, and while he was staying at Rome he spread this godless opinion. Cleomenes, who had become his disciple — a man foreign to the church both in his way of life and in his habits — used to give the Noetian teaching its backing. At that time Zephyrinus imagines that he is managing the affairs of the church: an uninformed man, and shamefully corrupt. Won over by offers of money, he was in the habit of shutting his eyes to those who came to become disciples of Cleomenes. [e]

In time Zephyrinus was drawn away himself and rushed headlong into the same opinions; and he had Callistus as his adviser and fellow champion in these wicked doctrines. The life of this Callistus, and the heresy he invented, I will explain in a little while. Handed down from one of these men to the next, the school kept gaining strength and growing, because Zephyrinus and Callistus helped them to prevail. But we have never at any time colluded with them. We have opposed them again and again, and refuted them, and forced them to admit the truth against their will. Shamed and pinned down by the truth, they have confessed their errors for a short time; and after a little they wallow again in the same mire.

But since we have set out the line of their descent, it seems best that we should next explain the corrupt teaching contained in their doctrines. To do that we will first bring forward the opinions put forward by Heraclitus “the Obscure,” and then make plain which parts of these opinions are Heraclitean in origin. The present champions of the system do not know that such parts belong to the Obscure philosopher; they imagine they belong to Christ. But if they should happen to come across the remarks that follow, perhaps they will be ashamed and give up this godless blasphemy of theirs. Now the opinion of Heraclitus has already been set out by us in the Philosophumena; still, it seems best to set the two systems down side by side now as well, so that this closer refutation may plainly instruct them — I mean the followers of this man, who imagine they are disciples of Christ when in fact they are not, but disciples of the Obscure. [i]

Heraclitus, then, says that the universe is one: divisible and indivisible, generated and ungenerated, mortal and immortal, Reason and eternity, Father and Son and justice, God. “Those who listen not to me but to the Reason would do wisely to agree that all things are one,” says Heraclitus. And because not everyone knows this or confesses it, he rebukes them in words something like these: “People do not understand how what is at variance nevertheless agrees with itself — a harmony that turns back on itself, as in a bow and a lyre.” But that Reason always exists, since it constitutes the universe and pervades all things, he states in this way: [k]

“Of this Reason, which always exists, men prove to be without understanding, both before they have heard of it and when they first hear of it. For although everything happens according to this Reason, they are like people with no experience of it, even when they attempt words and works of the kind I am giving an account of, dividing each thing according to its nature and declaring how it is.”

And that the universe is a Son, and through endless ages an eternal king of all things, he asserts in this way: “Eternity is a child at play, playing at dice; the kingdom belongs to a child.” And that the Father of all things that have been generated is begotten and unbegotten, creature and creator, listen to Heraclitus saying so in these words: “War is the father of all things and king of all; it has shown some to be gods and others men, and made some slaves and others free.” And he likewise affirms that there is “a harmony, as in a bow and lyre.” That the hidden harmony is the better one, though unknown and invisible to men, he asserts in these words: “A hidden harmony is better than an obvious one.” He praises and admires what is unknown and invisible in its power ahead of what is known. And that he is visible to men and not beyond discovery, he asserts in these words: “Whatever things are objects of sight, hearing, and understanding — these I honor above all,” he says; that is, he prefers what is visible to what is invisible. From expressions like these it is easy to understand the spirit of his philosophy.

“Men,” he says, “are deceived about the knowledge of visible things in the same way as Homer, who was wiser than all the Greeks. For even children killing vermin deceived him, when they said, ‘What we saw and caught, these we leave behind; what we neither saw nor caught, these we carry away.’”

In this way Heraclitus assigns to the visible an equal standing and an equal honor with the invisible, as if what is visible and what is invisible were admittedly one and the same thing. For he says, “A hidden harmony is better than an obvious one”; and, “Whatever things are objects of sight, hearing, and understanding” — that is, of the bodily organs — “these,” he says, “I honor above all,” though on that occasion, unlike the earlier one, he had not honored invisible things above all. So Heraclitus affirms that neither darkness nor light, neither evil nor good, is anything different: they are one and the same thing. At any rate he censures Hesiod for not knowing day and night. For day, he says, and night are one, and he puts it something like this: “Hesiod is the teacher of a vast amount of information, and people suppose this poet knows a great deal — and yet he did not know day and night, for they are one.” [p]

As for what is good and what is bad, they are likewise one. “Doctors, undoubtedly,” says Heraclitus, “when they make incisions and cauterize, though in every respect they wickedly torture the sick, complain that they do not receive the payment they deserve from their patients — and this though they perform these healing operations on their diseases.” And both straight and crooked are the same, he says. “The way of the fullers is straight and curved”; and the circular movement of the instrument in the fuller’s shop called a screw is straight and curved, for it revolves upward and in a circle at the same time. “One and the same, then,” he says, “are straight and curved.” And up and down, he says, are one and the same. “The way up and the way down are the same.” And he says that what is filthy and what is pure are one and the same, and what is drinkable and what is undrinkable are one and the same. “Sea,” he says, “is water at its purest and at its foulest: drinkable to fishes, no doubt, and healthy for them, but not fit for men to drink, and deadly to them.”

And he plainly asserts that what is immortal is mortal, and that what is mortal is immortal, in these words: “Immortals are mortal, and mortals immortal — that is, when the one take life from the death of the other, and the other death from the life of the one.” He also affirms that there is a resurrection of this flesh we can touch, the flesh we were born in; and he knows God to be the cause of this resurrection, putting it in this way: “Those that are here God will raise up and make guardians of the living and the dead.” And he likewise affirms that a judgment of the world and of everything in it takes place by fire, putting it this way: “The thunderbolt pilots all things” — that is, it directs them; and by the thunderbolt he means everlasting fire. He also asserts that this fire has intelligence in it and is the cause of the management of the universe, and he calls it need and fullness. Need, according to him, is the arranging of the world; fullness is its burning up. “For,” he says, “the fire will come upon all things, and judge them, and seize them.”

In this passage, though, Heraclitus explains all at once both the whole peculiarity of his own way of thinking and the character of the heresy of Noetus. And I have shown briefly that Noetus is not a disciple of Christ but of Heraclitus. For this philosopher asserts that the world that has been made becomes itself its own Craftsman and maker, in this passage: “God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger.” All things are opposites — this appears to be his meaning — “but an alteration takes place, just as when incense is mixed with other kinds of incense, and each is named according to the pleasant sensation it gives.”

Now it is plain to everyone that the silly successors of Noetus, and the champions of his heresy, even though they have never been hearers of Heraclitus’s discourses, nevertheless acknowledge these Heraclitean doctrines openly whenever they adopt the opinions of Noetus. For they make statements of this kind: that one and the same God is the Creator and Father of all things; and that when it pleased him, he nevertheless appeared, invisible though he is, to the righteous men of old. For when he is not seen he is invisible, and when he is seen he is visible; and he is incomprehensible when he does not wish to be comprehended, but comprehensible when he is comprehended. And so, by the same account, he is unconquerable and conquerable, unbegotten and begotten, immortal and mortal. How will men who hold opinions of this description not be proved to be disciples of Heraclitus? Did not the Obscure anticipate Noetus in framing a philosophy according to identical modes of expression?

Now no one is unaware that Noetus affirms the Son and the Father to be the same. He makes his statement in this way:

“When indeed the Father had not been born, he was still justly called Father; and when it pleased him to undergo generation, having been begotten he became his own Son — his own, and not another’s.”

In this way he thinks he establishes that God is sole ruler, alleging that Father and Son, so called, are one and the same, not one individual produced from another, but himself from himself; and that he is named Father and Son according to a change of times. And he holds that this is the one who appeared among us, both submitting to birth from a virgin and living as a man among men. Because of the birth that had taken place he confessed himself a Son to those who saw him; yet he made no secret, to those who could comprehend him, of his being a Father. This is the one who suffered by being fastened to the tree, and who committed his spirit to himself, who died and did not die; and who raised himself up on the third day, after being buried in a tomb, and wounded with a spear, and pierced with nails. Cleomenes asserts, along with his band of followers, that this person is God and Father of the universe, and so brings in among many people an obscurity of thought like the one we find in the philosophy of Heraclitus.

Callistus attempted to confirm this heresy — a man cunning in wickedness and subtle where deceit was concerned, driven by restless ambition to climb onto the overseer’s throne. This man molded Zephyrinus to his purpose, an ignorant and illiterate individual with no grasp of the church’s rules. And since Zephyrinus was open to bribes and greedy, Callistus was able, by luring him with presents and by improper demands, to seduce him into whatever course of action he pleased. So it was that Callistus succeeded in getting Zephyrinus to stir up disturbances among the brothers without end, while he himself took care afterward, by cunning talk, to attach both parties to himself in good will. At one time, to those who held true opinions, he would say in private that he held the same doctrines as they did, and so make dupes of them; at another he would act in the same way toward those who held the tenets of Sabellius. But Callistus perverted Sabellius himself, and this although he had the ability to set the man’s error right. For while we were admonishing him, Sabellius showed no obstinacy; but as long as he remained alone with Callistus, he was worked upon by this very Callistus to relapse into the system of Cleomenes, since Callistus alleges that he holds opinions like those of Cleomenes. Sabellius did not perceive Callistus’s cunning at the time, but he came to be aware of it afterward, as I will relate presently. [w]

Now Callistus brought Zephyrinus himself forward and induced him to avow the following sentiments publicly:

“I know that there is one God, Jesus Christ; and apart from him I know no other who is begotten and subject to suffering.”

And on another occasion he would make this statement:

“The Father did not die, but the Son.”

In this way Zephyrinus would keep up ceaseless disturbance among the people. And we, once we became aware of what he thought, did not give place to him, but reproved him and withstood him for the truth’s sake. And he rushed headlong into folly, because everyone consented to his hypocrisy — we, however, did not — and he called us worshippers of two gods, disgorging, with no one forcing him to it, the venom that lay hidden within him. It seems worth our while to explain the life of this heretic, since he was born about the same time as we were, so that by exposing the habits of a person of this description the heresy he attempted to establish may be easily recognized, and may perhaps be thought silly by people with any intelligence. This Callistus became a “martyr” at the period when Fuscianus was prefect of Rome, and the manner of his “martyrdom” was as follows.