The Rule of Truth

You see, my friend, the method these men use to deceive themselves, abusing the Scriptures while they try to prop up their own system out of them. That is why I set out the way they talk: so that you could see for yourself how crooked their procedure is and how wicked their error. Take the first point. If John had meant to set out that Ogdoad above, he would surely have kept the order in which it was produced. He would have put the first Tetrad first, since on their own account it is the most venerable of all, and then attached the second, so that the sequence of the names would display the order of the Ogdoad. He would not have mentioned the first Tetrad last of all, after so long a gap, as though he had forgotten it for a moment and then called it back to mind. Take the second point. If he had meant to point out their pairings, he certainly would not have left out the name Ecclesia. As for the rest of the pairs, either he would have been content to name the male Aeons, since the others could be understood along with them, and so kept the thing uniform throughout; or, if he was listing the pairs of the others, he would have announced the partner of Anthropos too, and not left us to guess at her name. [a]

So the falseness of this exposition is plain. John proclaims one God, the Almighty, and one Jesus Christ, the only Son, through whom everything was made. He declares that this one is the Son of God, this one the only Son, this one the maker of all things, this one the true light who gives light to everyone, this one the creator of the world, this one who came to what was his own, this one who became flesh and lived among us. These men take those statements, twist them with a plausible-sounding explanation, and maintain that there was some other Monogenes, produced in their sequence, whom they also call Arche. They maintain that there was another Savior as well, and another Logos, the son of Monogenes, and another Christ, produced to set the Pleroma right again. In this way they wrench every one of the expressions I have quoted away from the truth, take unfair advantage of the names, and carry them across into their own system — so that on their account John, in all these words, makes no mention of the Lord Jesus Christ at all. For if he has named the Father, and Charis, and Monogenes, and Aletheia, and Logos, and Zoe, and Anthropos, and Ecclesia, then on their assumption he was speaking of the first Ogdoad, in which there was as yet no Jesus and no Christ, John’s own teacher. But John himself has made it clear that he was not speaking about their pairings but about our Lord Jesus Christ, whom he also acknowledges as the Word of God. Summing up what he had said about the Word, he goes on to declare: “And the Word was made flesh, and lived among us.” On their assumption the Word did not become flesh at all, since he never went outside the Pleroma; it was that Savior who became flesh — the one put together by a special arrangement out of all the Aeons, and later in date than the Word.

Learn, then, you foolish men, that the Jesus who suffered for us and lived among us is himself the Word of God. If some other of the Aeons had become flesh for our salvation, it would be reasonable to think the apostle was speaking of another. But if the Word of the Father who came down is the same one who also went up — the only Son of the one and only God, who by the Father’s good pleasure became flesh for the sake of human beings — then the apostle is certainly not speaking of any other, nor of any Ogdoad, but of our Lord Jesus Christ. On their account the Word never became flesh in the first place. They hold that the Savior took on a body made of soul, formed by a special arrangement through some providence they cannot put into words, so that he could be seen and handled. But flesh is what God formed long ago for Adam out of the dust of the ground, and it is this that John has declared the Word of God became. So their first and firstborn Ogdoad is brought to nothing. Since Logos and Monogenes and Zoe and Phos and Soter and Christos and the Son of God and the one who took on flesh for us have all been shown to be one and the same, the Ogdoad they have built up falls apart at once; and when that is destroyed, their whole system collapses — the system they dream into existence, doing injury to the Scriptures while they build up a theory of their own.

Then again, they collect a set of expressions and names scattered here and there in Scripture and twist them, as I have already said, from a natural sense into an unnatural one. In doing it they behave like people who put forward whatever theory they please and then try to make it fit out of the poems of Homer, so that an uninformed listener imagines Homer really composed those verses on that subject, when in fact the subject has only just been invented. Many are carried far enough by the smooth run of the verses to wonder whether Homer may not have written them so after all. Here is a specimen of the kind. Someone describes Heracles as sent by Eurystheus after the dog in the world below, and does it by means of these verses of Homer — and there can be no objection to my quoting them as an illustration, since the same sort of attempt is at work in both cases:

Now what plain, simple man would not be carried off by verses like these into thinking that Homer framed them about that subject? But the man who knows the writings of Homer will recognize the verses and not the subject they have been put to, since he knows that some of them were spoken of Odysseus, some of Heracles himself, some of Priam, and others of Menelaus and Agamemnon. If he takes them and restores each of them to its own place, he destroys that story at once. In the same way, the man who keeps unshaken in himself the rule of the truth that he received at his baptism will recognize the names, the phrases and the parables that come from the Scriptures, but he will certainly not recognize the blasphemous use these men make of them. He will acknowledge the gems, but he will not accept a fox in place of the likeness of the king. And when he has restored every one of the quoted expressions to its own place and fitted it to the body of the truth, he will strip their invention bare and show that it stands on nothing.

But since the stroke that would finish off this exhibition is still missing — the point at which anyone who has followed their farce to the end could then add an argument to overturn it — I have judged it worth pointing out, first of all, where the very fathers of this fable differ among themselves, as though each of them were inspired by a different spirit of error. That fact by itself is proof, before anything else is said, that the truth the Church proclaims stands unmoved and that these men’s theories are a fabric of lies.

The Church, though scattered through the whole world to the ends of the earth, received from the apostles and their disciples this faith: in one God, the Father Almighty, who made heaven and earth and the sea and everything in them; and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who took on flesh for our salvation; and in the Holy Spirit, who announced through the prophets God’s arrangements — the comings of Christ, the birth from a virgin, the suffering, the rising from the dead, the bodily ascension into heaven of our beloved Lord Christ Jesus, and his appearing from heaven in the glory of the Father to gather all things into one, and to raise up again all flesh of the whole human race; so that to Christ Jesus our Lord and God and Savior and King, according to the will of the invisible Father, every knee should bow, of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth, and every tongue should confess to him, and that he should carry out just judgment on all. He will send the spiritual forces of evil, and the angels who broke his commands and turned rebel, together with the ungodly and unrighteous and lawless and profane among human beings, into everlasting fire; but on the righteous and holy, and on those who have kept his commands and have stayed in his love — some from the beginning, others from the time they repented — he will by his grace confer immortality, and will surround them with everlasting glory. [l]

As I have already said, the Church has received this preaching and this faith, and although she is scattered over the whole world she guards it carefully, as though she lived in a single house. She believes these things as though she had one soul and the very same heart, and she proclaims them and teaches them and hands them on in perfect harmony, as though she had only one mouth. The languages of the world are unlike one another, but the content of what is handed down is one and the same. The churches planted in Germany do not believe or hand down anything different, nor do those in Spain, nor those in Gaul, nor those in the East, nor those in Egypt, nor those in Libya, nor those established in the middle of the world. As the sun, that creature of God, is one and the same over the whole world, so also the preaching of the truth shines everywhere and gives light to everyone who is willing to come to a knowledge of the truth. No one who leads a church, however powerfully he can speak, will teach anything different from this, for no one is greater than the teacher; and the man who is poor at putting things into words does the handing-down no injury. The faith is always one and the same: the man who can talk about it at great length adds nothing to it, and the man who can say only a little takes nothing away.

It does not follow, because some people are given more understanding and some less, that they should therefore change the subject itself and imagine some other God besides the one who framed and made and keeps this universe going, as if he were not enough for them, or another Christ, or another only Son. What it does mean is simply this: that one man may bring out the meaning of things said in parables better than another and fit them to the general shape of the faith; may explain more clearly how God works and how he has arranged what he does for the salvation of human beings; may show that God was long-suffering over the rebellion of the angels who broke his commands and over the disobedience of human beings; may set out why one and the same God has made some things temporary and some everlasting, some heavenly and some earthly; may understand why God, though invisible, showed himself to the prophets not under one form but differently to different men; may show why more covenants than one were given to the human race, and teach what the particular character of each of them was; may search out why God has shut up all things in unbelief, so that he may have mercy on all; may give thanks as he describes why the Word of God became flesh and suffered; may tell why the coming of the Son of God took place in these last times, at the end rather than at the beginning; may unfold what the Scriptures contain about the end itself and the things to come; may not keep silent about how it is that God has made the nations, whose salvation was despaired of, fellow heirs, part of the same body, and sharers with the holy ones; may speak of how “this mortal body will put on immortality, and this perishable will put on imperishability”; may proclaim in what sense God says, “They are a people who were not a people, and she is loved who was not loved,” and in what sense he says that “the children of the deserted woman are more than the children of the woman who has a husband.” It is about these things, and others like them, that the apostle cries out: “Oh, the depth of the riches of both the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments are, and his ways past finding out!”

But the greater skill I am speaking of does not consist in imagining, beyond the Creator and Framer of the world, the Enthymesis of an Aeon that went astray — their mother and his — and so climbing to that pitch of blasphemy; nor in falsely imagining, above this supposed being, a Pleroma reckoned at one time as thirty Aeons and at another as a countless tribe of them, as these teachers maintain who have no share in real divine wisdom. Meanwhile the universal Church, as I have already said, holds one and the same faith through the whole world.