文集 第 23 章 第 1/3 段

I. The condition of the present times provokes even this admonition of ours: that we ought not to marvel at these heresies, whether because they exist — for they were foretold as about to be — or because they subvert the faith of some, for this is their very purpose, that faith, by having temptation, might have also its testing. Vainly, therefore, and inconsiderately are very many scandalized by this very thing, that heresies avail so much. How much would they avail, if they had not been? When a thing has been so allotted that in every way it is to exist, then, just as it receives a cause on account of which it exists, so it obtains a power through which it exists, and cannot but be. II.

The fever, in short, appointed to man among the other deadly and torturing means of death, we do not marvel at because it exists — for it does exist — nor because it does away with man, for to this end it exists. So too, if we are terrified that heresies, produced for the languishing and destruction of faith, can do this, it is first for us to be terrified that they exist as such — heresies which, while they exist, have power, and while they can, have existence. But indeed the fever, as an evil both in its cause and in its potency, as is well known, we abominate rather than marvel at, and, as far as in us lies, we guard against it, not having its abolition within our power.

But as for heresies, which bring in eternal death and the burning of a greater fire, some prefer to marvel that they can do this, rather than to avoid being able to be destroyed by them, though they have the power of avoiding. For the rest, heresies will avail nothing, if only men do not marvel that they avail so much. For either, while men marvel, they are furnished as an occasion of stumbling, or, because they are scandalized, therefore they marvel, as though the fact that heresies avail so much came from some truth. It is a wonder, forsooth, that evil should have its own strength — except that heresies avail much among those who avail not in the faith! In the contest of boxers and gladiators, for the most part one wins not because he is strong or because he cannot be conquered, but because the one who was conquered was of no strength:

so much so that this same victor, afterwards matched with one who is truly strong, withdraws even overcome. Not otherwise do heresies derive whatever strength they have from the weaknesses of certain persons, availing nothing if they run up against a faith that is truly strong. III. These wonderers are indeed wont to be edified unto ruin by certain persons captured by heresy: 'Why has this woman, or that man, most faithful, most prudent, most approved in the Church, gone over to that party?' Who that says this does not himself answer himself, that those whom heresies could pervert are to be reckoned neither prudent nor faithful nor approved? And is this a wonder, I suppose, that one once approved should afterwards fall away? Saul, good beyond the rest, is afterwards overturned by envy.

David, a good man after the Lord's own heart, is afterwards guilty of murder and adultery. Solomon, endowed by the Lord with all grace and wisdom, is led into idolatry by women. For to the Son of God alone was it reserved to remain without sin. What, then, if a bishop, if a deacon, if a widow, if a virgin, if a teacher, if even a martyr, has fallen from the rule of faith? Shall heresies on that account be seen to hold the truth? Do we prove the faith from persons, or persons from the faith? No one is wise unless he be faithful, no one is greater unless he be a Christian, and no one is a Christian unless he has persevered to the very end. You, as a man, know each one from the outside; you think what you see, and you see only so far as you have eyes. But 'the eyes,' He says, 'of the Lord are lofty.'

Man looks upon the face, God upon the heart. And therefore the Lord knows those who are His, and roots up the plant which He did not plant, and shows the last out of the first, and carries the winnowing-fan in His hand to purge His threshing-floor. Let the chaff of a light faith fly away as much as it will at whatever blast of temptations, so much the purer will the mass of wheat be laid up in the Lord's barns. Did not certain of the disciples, offended, turn away from the Lord Himself? Yet not on that account did the rest also think they should depart from His footsteps; but those who knew that He was the Word of life and had come from God persevered in His company to the very end, when He had graciously offered that they too, if they wished, might depart.

It is a lesser matter if certain men — Phygellus and Hermogenes and Philetus and Hymenaeus — forsook His apostle; the very betrayer of Christ was one of the Apostles. Do we marvel at His churches if they are deserted by some, when the very things we suffer prove us Christians after the example of Christ Himself? 'They went out from us,' he says, 'but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would surely have remained with us.' IV. Rather, let us be mindful both of the Lord's pronouncements and of the apostolic writings, which both foretold to us that heresies would come and prescribed that they were to be shunned; and, just as we are not terrified that they exist, so let us not marvel that it is able to do that on account of which they are to be shunned.

The Lord instructs us that many will come in sheep's clothing, ravening wolves. What are these sheep's clothings but the outward surface of the Christian name? What the ravening wolves but the crafty senses and spirits, lurking within to infest the flock of Christ? What the false prophets but false preachers? What the false apostles but adulterous evangelizers? What the antichrists, both for the time and always, but the rebels against Christ? Such will heresies be, harassing the Church by the perversity of new doctrines no less than antichrist will then persecute it by the atrocity of persecutions — except that persecution makes even martyrs, but heresy makes only apostates.

And therefore heresies too had to exist, that those who are approved might be made manifest — both those who stood firm in persecutions and those who did not swerve aside into heresies. For neither does he bid those to be understood as approved who change their faith into heresy, as, on the contrary, they interpret in their own favour, because he said elsewhere: 'Test all things; hold fast that which is good.' As though it were not permitted that all, when things have been ill tested, should strike through error upon the choosing of some evil. V. Furthermore, if he rebukes dissensions and schisms, which without doubt are evils, and immediately subjoins heresies, then, since he joins them to evils, he certainly professes them to be an evil, and indeed a greater one, when he says he therefore believed the reports of schisms and dissensions because he knew that heresies also must needs be.

For he shows that, at the sight of a graver evil, he readily believed the lighter ones; certainly not that he therefore believed the evils because heresies were good, but that from temptations of a worse stamp also he might forewarn men that they need not marvel at those which he said tended to the making manifest of the approved — namely, of those whom he could not deprave. In short, if the whole passage is directed to the maintaining of unity and the coercing of separations, and heresies no less than schisms and dissensions tear men away from unity, then without doubt he has placed heresies also in that same condition of reprehension in which he placed schisms and dissensions.

And by this he does not make those approved who have turned aside into heresies, since he most strongly upbraids the very turning aside from such things, teaching that all should speak the one thing and hold the same understanding — which very thing heresies do not permit. VI. Nor need we dwell longer on this — whether it is the same Paul who elsewhere also enumerates heresies among the works of the flesh, writing to the Galatians, and who suggests to Titus that a heretical man is to be refused after a first correction, because such a one is perverse and offends, so as to be self-condemned. But in almost every epistle, inculcating the avoidance of adulterine doctrines, he brands heresies, whose works are the adulterine doctrines: called 'heresies' by the Greek word from the meaning of 'choice,' by which a man makes especial use of it, whether for establishing or for taking them up.

Therefore he also said the heretic to be self-condemned, because in the very point wherein he is condemned he has made a choice for himself. But for us it is not permitted to bring in anything of our own choosing, nor even to choose what another has brought in of his own choosing. We have the Lord's Apostles as our authors, who themselves also did not choose anything of their own choosing to bring in, but faithfully assigned to the nations the discipline they had received from Christ. And so, even if an angel from heaven should preach otherwise, he would be pronounced anathema by us. The Holy Spirit had already then foreseen that there would be, in a certain virgin Philumene, an angel of seduction transfiguring himself into an angel of light, by whose signs and wonders Apelles was induced and brought in a new heresy. VII.

These are the doctrines of men and of demons, born for itching ears out of the ingenuity of worldly wisdom — which the Lord, calling it foolishness, chose the foolish things of the world for the confounding even of philosophy itself. For this is the matter of worldly wisdom, that rash interpreter of the divine nature and dispensation. The heresies themselves, in fact, are equipped by philosophy. From this source come the aeons and I know not what infinite forms, and the trinity of man in Valentinus: he had been a Platonist. From this came Marcion's god, the better one from tranquillity: he had come from the Stoics. And that the soul is said to perish: Epicurus is heeded; and that the restitution of the flesh is denied, this is taken from the one school of all the philosophers; and where matter is made equal with God, it is the teaching of Zeno;

and where anything is alleged about a fiery god, there Heraclitus intervenes. The same subject-matter is turned over among heretics and philosophers, the same discussions are entangled: whence evil, and why? and whence man, and how? and — what Valentinus lately propounded — whence God? forsooth, from Enthymesis and Ectroma. Wretched Aristotle! who taught them dialectic, that craftswoman of building up and pulling down, shifty in her propositions, forced in her conjectures, hard in her arguments, a worker of contentions, troublesome even to herself, retracting everything so as to have treated nothing thoroughly.

Hence those fables and endless genealogies and unprofitable questions and words that spread like a cancer, from which the Apostle, restraining us, testifies by name that philosophy and vain deceit ought to be guarded against, writing to the Colossians: 'See that no one circumvents you through philosophy and vain deceit, according to the tradition of men, contrary to the providence of the Holy Spirit.' He had been at Athens and, from his encounters, had come to know that human wisdom, that affecter and interpolator of the truth, itself also split into many parts by the variety of its mutually warring sects. What, then, has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What has the Academy to do with the Church? What have heretics to do with Christians?

Our instruction is from the porch of Solomon, who had himself handed down that the Lord is to be sought in simplicity of heart. Let them look to it who have brought forward a Stoic and Platonic and dialectical Christianity! We have no need of curiosity after Christ Jesus, nor of inquiry after the Gospel. When we believe, we desire nothing beyond believing. For this we believe first: that there is nothing further which we ought to believe. VIII. I come, therefore, to that clause which both our own people put forward for entering upon curiosity, and the heretics urge for importing scrupulosity. 'It is written,' they say, 'Seek, and you shall find.' Let us recall when the Lord uttered this saying.

I suppose it was in the very first-fruits of His teaching, when it was still doubted among all whether He was the Christ, when not even Peter had yet pronounced Him the Son of God, when even John had ceased to be certain about Him. Rightly, then, was it said at that time, 'Seek, and you shall find,' when He was still to be sought who was not yet recognized — and this as regards the Jews. For to them belongs the whole discourse of this reproach, who had the means whereby to seek Christ. 'They have,' He says, 'Moses and Elijah,' that is, the Law and the Prophets, preaching Christ, according to what He says elsewhere openly: 'Search the Scriptures, in which you hope for salvation; for they speak of me.' This will be the meaning of 'Seek, and you shall find.'

For that what follows also applies to the Jews is manifest: 'Knock, and it shall be opened to you.' The Jews had formerly been with God; then, cast out for their offences, they began to be outside God; but the nations were never with God, save as a drop from a bucket and dust from the threshing-floor, and always outside. And so, they who are always outside — how shall they knock at the place where they never were? What door do they know, into which they were neither admitted nor cast out at any time? But he who knows that he was within and was driven forth, he rather will knock and knows the door. Likewise, 'Ask, and you shall receive,' belongs to him who knew from whom to ask, from whom something had been promised — namely, from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, whom the nations had known no more than any promise of His.

And indeed He was speaking to Israel: 'I am not sent,' He says, 'but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.' Not yet was He casting to the dogs the children's bread, not yet had He commanded them to go into the way of the nations. Since indeed at the end He gave the precept that they should go to teach and baptize the nations, being soon about to obtain the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, who was to lead them into all truth. And this, therefore, He does for them. But if the apostles, destined as teachers for the nations, were themselves also about to obtain the Paraclete as teacher, much more will 'Seek, and you shall find' be void as regards us, to whom the teaching was to come unsought through the apostles, and to the apostles themselves through the Holy Spirit.

Indeed, all the sayings of the Lord are set before all men; through the ears of the Jews they have passed to us. But most of them, directed to particular persons, have constituted for us not a strict propriety of admonition, but an example. IX. I now yield voluntarily from this ground. Grant that it was said to all, 'Seek, and you shall find'; yet even here the sense must be examined with a sure helm of interpretation. No divine utterance is so loosened and diffused that the words alone are to be maintained, and the reason of the words not established. But first of all I lay down this: that assuredly some one certain thing was instituted by Christ, which the nations ought in every way to believe, and therefore to seek, that they may be able, when they have found, to believe. Moreover, of one certain institution there cannot be an infinite inquiry;

one must seek until you find, and believe when you have found, and nothing further save to keep what you have believed — while you believe this besides, that there is nothing else to be believed, and therefore nothing else to be sought, once you have found and believed that which was instituted by Him who commands you to inquire after nothing other than what He instituted. Concerning this, indeed, if anyone doubts, it will be established that it rests with us — that which was instituted by Christ. Meanwhile, out of confidence in the proof, I anticipate by admonishing certain persons that there is nothing to be sought beyond what they have believed: that this is what they ought to have sought, lest they interpret 'Seek, and you shall find' without the discipline of reason. X. Now the reason of this saying rests upon three points: on the matter, on the time, on the manner.

In the matter itself, consider what is to be sought; in the time, when; in the manner, how far. Therefore what Christ appointed is to be sought—assuredly for as long as you have not found it, assuredly until you find it. But you have found it once you have believed. For you would not have believed had you not found, just as you would not have sought except in order to find. To this end, then, seeking that you may find, and to this end finding that you may believe, by believing you have set a limit to all further pursuit of seeking and finding. This very limit is fixed for you by the fruit of seeking itself. This boundary He has marked out for you Himself, who wills that you believe nothing other than what He appointed, and therefore that you seek nothing further.

But if, because others too have set up just as many other things, we are on that account bound to seek so long as we are able to find, then we shall always be seeking and shall never at all believe. For where will be the end of seeking? Where the resting-place of believing? Where the discharge of finding? With Marcion? But Valentinus too propounds: 'Seek and you shall find.' With Valentinus? But Apelles also will assail me with this same pronouncement; and Ebion and Simon and all in their turn have nothing else by which, insinuating themselves to me, they may draw me over to themselves. It will therefore be nowhere, so long as everywhere I meet 'Seek and you shall find'—as though it were nowhere, and as though I had never laid hold of that which Christ appointed, which ought to be sought, which must be believed. XI.

One errs without penalty unless one transgresses—though to err is itself to transgress; without penalty, I say, does he wander who abandons nothing. But if I have believed what I ought to have believed, and yet think that something else must again be sought, I surely hope that there is something else to be found; and I could in no way hope for that except because either I had not believed, though I seemed to have believed, or I have ceased to believe. Thus, deserting my faith, I am found to be a denier. Let me say it once for all: no one seeks except one who either never had, or has lost. That old woman had lost one of her ten drachmas, and therefore was seeking; yet when she found it, she ceased to seek. The neighbour had no bread, and therefore was knocking; yet when the door was opened to him and he received, he ceased to knock. The widow was asking the judge to hear her, because she was not admitted:

but when she was heard, thus far she persisted. So there is an end both to seeking and to knocking and to asking. 'For to him that asks it shall be given,' He says, 'and to him that knocks it shall be opened, and by him that seeks it shall be found.' Let him look to it who seeks forever because he does not find; for he seeks there where it shall not be found. Let him look to it who forever knocks because it shall never be opened; for he knocks there where no one is. Let him look to it who forever asks because he shall never be heard; for he asks of one who does not hear. XII. As for us, even if it were still and always necessary to seek, yet where ought we to seek? Among the heretics? Where all things are foreign and hostile to our truth, to whom we are forbidden to approach? What servant hopes for provisions from a stranger—not to say from an enemy of his master?

What soldier looks for a bounty and pay from kings not in league—not to say from hostile kings—unless he be plainly a deserter and a runaway and a rebel? Even that old woman was seeking the drachma within her own house; even that knocker was beating upon his neighbour's door; even that widow was appealing to a judge, though harsh, yet not an enemy. No one can be instructed from that whereby he is undone; no one is enlightened by him by whom he is darkened. Let us therefore seek in what is ours, and from those who are ours, and concerning what is ours: and that only which can come into question while the rule of faith is kept intact. XIII. Now the rule of faith is this—that we may here and now profess what it is we maintain—namely that whereby it is believed:

that there is one only God, and none other besides the Maker of the world, who produced the universe out of nothing through His own Word, first of all sent forth. That this Word, called His Son, was in the name of God seen in diverse ways by the patriarchs, ever heard in the prophets, and at last, brought down by the Spirit and power of God the Father into the Virgin Mary, was made flesh in her womb, and, born of her, lived as Jesus Christ.

That thereafter He preached a new law and a new promise of the kingdom of heaven, wrought miracles, was crucified, rose again on the third day, was caught up into the heavens and sat at the right hand of the Father; that He sent in His stead the power of the Holy Spirit to guide believers; that He shall come with glory to take up the saints into the enjoyment of eternal life and of the heavenly promises, and to adjudge the profane to perpetual fire, after the resurrection of both parties, with the restoration of the flesh. This rule, instituted by Christ (as shall be proved), raises among us no questions save those which the heresies bring in and which make men heretics. XIV.

For the rest, so long as its form remains in its own order, you may seek and discuss as much as you please and pour out all your itch of curiosity: if anything seems to you to hang in ambiguity or to be shadowed by obscurity, there is assuredly some brother, a teacher endowed with the grace of knowledge; there is someone who has moved among the well-practised; there is someone with you who, though seeking, seeks with more care. In the end it is better not to know, lest you know what you ought not, because you do know what you ought. 'Your faith,' He says, 'has saved you'—not your exercise in the Scriptures. Faith is set in the rule; it has its law and its salvation from the keeping of the law. But exercise consists in curiosity, having its glory solely from the zeal of expertise. Let curiosity yield to faith, let glory yield to salvation.

At the very least let them either not clamour, or be still. To know nothing against the rule is to know all things. Suppose the heretics were not enemies of the truth, so that we were not forewarned to shun them: what sort of thing is it to confer with men who themselves profess that they are still seeking? For if they are indeed still seeking, they have as yet found nothing certain; and therefore whatever they seem meanwhile to hold, they betray their own doubt so long as they seek. And so you, who likewise seek, looking to those who are themselves seeking—doubtful going to the doubtful, uncertain to the uncertain, blind to the blind—must needs be led into the pit.

But since, for the sake of deceiving, they pretend that they are still seeking, in order that by casting anxiety upon us they may insinuate their treatises to us—yet as soon as they have come to us, they at once defend the very things they said must be sought—then we ought so to refute them that they may know that it is not Christ, but themselves, whom we deny. For while they still seek, they do not yet hold; while they do not yet hold, they have not yet believed; while they have not yet believed, they are not Christians. But when they do hold and believe, they nonetheless say that inquiry must be made, that they may defend it. Before they defend it, they deny what they believe, confessing that they have not yet believed while they seek. Those, then, who are not even Christians to themselves, how much less are they so to us? Coming as they do through deceit, what kind of faith do they dispute for?

For what truth do they act as patrons who bring it in from a lie? 'But they themselves proceed from the Scriptures, and from the Scriptures they persuade.' From what other source, forsooth, could they speak concerning matters of faith, save from the writings of faith? XV. We come, therefore, to our proposition. For to this we were directing our course, and this we were laying as a foundation in the preface of our discourse, that from this point we may now engage upon that on which the adversaries challenge us. They hold out the Scriptures, and by this their boldness they at once move certain persons. But in the very encounter they weary the strong, catch the weak, and dismiss the middling with a scruple. This step, therefore, above all we bar—that they are not to be admitted to any disputation from the Scriptures.

If these are their strength—that they may be able to have them—it ought to be examined to whom the possession of the Scriptures belongs, lest he be admitted to them to whom they in no way belong. XVI. I would have introduced this not out of any counsel of distrust or from a desire of framing the case otherwise, unless a reason stood firm, first of all that our faith owes obedience to the Apostle who forbids us to enter upon questions, to lend our ears to novel utterances, and to meet a heretic after one admonition, not after a disputation. So utterly did he forbid disputation, designating the admonition as the cause of meeting the heretic.

And this 'once'—namely because he is not a Christian—lest he should seem, after the manner of a Christian, to require correction once and again, and under two or three witnesses; whereas he is to be corrected for the very reason on account of which there is to be no disputing with him. Furthermore, since no profit comes from an encounter over the Scriptures, save plainly that one should come away either with an upsetting of his stomach or of his brain. XVII. That heresy does not receive certain Scriptures; and any it does receive, it does not receive entire, but perverts them by additions and subtractions to suit the arrangement of its own scheme; and if it presents them in any measure entire, it nonetheless twists them by devising diverse expositions. A false sense clamours against the truth as much as does a corrupting pen;

empty presumptions necessarily refuse to acknowledge the things by which they are refuted; they rely on those things which they have composed out of falsehood, and which they have seized upon out of ambiguity. What will you advance, most exercised in the Scriptures, when, if you defend anything, it is denied from the opposite side, and if you deny anything, it is defended? And you indeed will lose nothing but your voice in the wrangling, and will gain nothing but bile at their blasphemy. XVIII. But he, if there be any for whose sake you descend into the encounter of the Scriptures in order to confirm him in his doubting, will he incline toward the truth, or rather toward the heresies? Moved by this very thing—that he sees you have advanced nothing, the opposite party denying and defending on equal footing, the standing at any rate the same—he will go away from the altercation more uncertain than before, not knowing which he should judge to be the heresy.

These very things, to be sure, they too have to turn back against us. For they too must needs say that it is rather by us that adulterations of the Scriptures and falsehoods of exposition are brought in, they who likewise claim the truth for themselves. XIX. Therefore we must not appeal to the Scriptures, nor must the contest be set up in those matters in which victory is either none, or uncertain, or too little certain. For even if the comparison of Scriptures did not so turn out as to set both sides on a par, the order of things demanded that that be first propounded which alone is now to be disputed: to whom belongs the faith itself, whose the Scriptures are; from whom, and through whom, and when, and to whom was delivered that discipline whereby men are made Christians.

For where it shall appear that the truth of the Christian discipline and faith is, there will be the truth of the Scriptures and of the expositions and of all the Christian traditions. XX. Christ Jesus our Lord—may He permit me to say it for the moment—whoever He is, of whatever God the Son, of whatever substance man and God, of whatever faith the teacher, of whatever reward the promiser: what He was, what He had been, what will of the Father He was administering, what He determined man must do—so long as He walked on earth, He Himself proclaimed, whether openly to the people or apart to His disciples, from among whom He had chosen twelve chief ones, attached to His side, destined to be teachers of the nations.

And so, one of them having been struck off, He commanded the remaining eleven, as He departed to the Father after the resurrection, to go and teach the nations, baptizing them into the Father and into the Son and into the Holy Spirit. At once, therefore, the apostles—which name is interpreted as 'sent'—having taken by lot Matthias as the twelfth in the place of Judas, by the authority of the prophecy which is in the psalm of David, and having obtained the promised power of the Holy Spirit for miracles and utterance, first throughout Judaea bore witness to the faith in Jesus Christ and founded churches; then, going forth into the world, they promulgated the same doctrine of the same faith to the nations.