Tractates 2 part 2/6

But we have not so learned Christ; rather, being taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, we understand that the law is spiritual, but we are carnal, sold under sin, and comparing spiritual things with spiritual we labor, so that, as we have borne the image of him who is of the clay, when, overcome by our faults, we walked in vices, so we may bear the image of him who is from heaven; and putting off, according to the former manner of life, the old man, which is corrupted according to the desires of error, we may be renewed in the spirit of our mind, putting on the new man, who is created according to God in holiness and righteousness and truth.

For we know and have learned that we are God's workmanship in good works, which God prepared that we should walk in them; as Moses also says: God made man after his own image and likeness, and breathed into his face the breath of life, and man was made into a living soul. And we know that Eve, who was deceived and fell into transgression, shall be saved through the bearing of children, if she abide in faith, and acknowledging that she was taken out of her own husband, and bearing children in sorrow, her turning shall be to her husband; as it is written in the prophet: For this cause, behold, I, says the Lord, will close up your mother's way with stakes, and I will not build up her path, and her tracks she shall not find;

she shall pursue her lovers and shall not overtake them, and she shall say: I will return to my former husband, for it was then better with me than now.

In this understanding, set free, as it is written, from our mother's womb, and not yielding to flesh and blood, we labor; and as we were servants of sin unto death, so we are servants of righteousness unto righteousness, knowing that even though our outward man is corrupted, yet the inward man is renewed; and as the first man is of the earth, of the clay, so the works of the flesh are made manifest, which are adulteries, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, luxury, idolatry, sorceries, enmities, contentions, jealousies, wraths, brawls, dissensions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and the like. Among these let the demons Saclas and Nebroel have their portion among their own; for let them not seek a place among things chaste and religious.

And as the second man is from heaven, heavenly, so the works of the Spirit are made manifest, which are love, joy, peace, patience, long-suffering, goodness, meekness, faith, continence, chastity, kindness, and love; in which Christ, appearing as God, said that we are his temple, and willed to dwell in us, in that which he himself had made for himself within us, as the prophet Job also says: Thy hands have fashioned me and made me; thereafter, changing, thou didst cast me down; remember that thou didst form me of mud from the earth and didst call me back again, and thou didst milk me like milk and didst curdle me like cheese; with skin and flesh thou didst clothe me, with bones and sinews thou didst frame me; but life and mercy thou didst place with me, and thy visitation kept my spirit.

And therefore, with the word ever repeated: let him be anathema who denies that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, for this is antichrist; let him be anathema who denies that Christ Jesus, God, the Son of God, was crucified for us, as the prophet says: This one bears our sins and grieves for us; and again, Paul testifies that he knows nothing else save Jesus Christ, and him crucified; let him be anathema who denies that our Lord God was fastened with nails, or given vinegar to drink, or gall, since he himself said to his disciples: Put your hands into the rents of the wounds of my hands; and we read it written in the Gospel: And they took a sponge full of vinegar and gall and gave him to drink, and he said, 'It is finished.'

All these things the schismatics or heretics, according to their established practice, corrupting the Scriptures and inserting the sense of their own wickedness into the divine words, have mingled, falsehoods with truths and lies with catholic things. Let him be anathema who does not condemn Manes and his works, doctrines, and institutions; whose foul deeds in particular we would pursue with the sword, if it could be done, and send them down to hell, or to anything worse than Gehenna and its ever-watchful torment, where neither the fire is quenched nor the worm dies. And lest their impurity should lie hidden from the divine judgment, their evils have been exposed even to secular judgments.

For besides those things which, asserting with erratic notions, they have held the Sun and Moon, rulers of the earth's orb, to be gods—though it is written: What is brighter than the sun? yet even this shall fail—so they have enlarged the follies of their wretched sacrileges, that, with minds oppressed by blindness, in order to bind themselves the more impiously, they would say that they consecrate themselves the more religiously. Let him be anathema who does not condemn the fornications of the Nicolaitans and the manifold things shown in the Scriptures—demons with their disciples and teachers—or who follow their works. Let them perish who have received into themselves the perfidy of the Ophites and, having become sons of vipers, confess a god and lord of theirs like to themselves.

And because it would be long to go through each one, all the heresies which men, corrupt in mind and shipwrecked from the faith, have fabricated for themselves, whether out of the canonical Scriptures or out of the apocrypha, beyond the things that are written, one puffed up against another for one or another—and whatever the Saturninian heresy introduced, or the Novatian brought forth, or set forth at the teaching of Basilides, or the Arian collected, or the Patripassian instructed, or the Homuncionite falsely devised, or the Cataphrygian persuaded, or the Borborite seized upon—we, with catholic mouth and believing in God Christ, together with all who follow or teach these things or would wish to assert them, condemn;

all of whose dogmas we dissolve by the light of the divine testimonies among us—not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think anything as of ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God. Yet among these things there is a new saying—and I will say it is damnable not only in the deed but even in the telling, and brought forth by no heretical author before this—a wicked sacrilege which, reading it, Itacius introduced into our ears: that by magical incantations the first-fruits should be either expiated or consecrated for tasting, and that an ointment should be consecrated for the accursed Sun and Moon, with whom it shall fail. He who read, brought forth, believed, did, held, and introduced this is not only anathema maranatha, but is also to be pursued with the sword, since it is written: You shall not suffer sorcerers to live.

Let them, therefore, keep to themselves the wicked inventions of the heretics and the interpretations worthy of Gehenna; let them hold to themselves the fickle whims of schismatic slanders: the tabernacle of Christ God and the temple which is in us, no one shall pull down. Let them, reading the Scriptures, suppose God to be stony, horny, of stone: to us, in all Scripture, as it is written, God is the unicorn; to us Christ is the rock, to us Jesus is the cornerstone, to us Christ is the man of men. Let them, as sons of perdition and of the devil, believe themselves to be glutted with the devil's rain: to us, God is almighty, who calls the water of the sea and sprinkles it upon the face of the whole earth, and grants the early and the latter rain.

And if these wretched men themselves wish to know what manner of god is theirs, in whom they believe: he is, as it is written in the prophet, the beast that sleeps under every tree, by the wood and the papyrus and the reed; he is, according to what is written in Job, the Lord speaking: In the circle of his teeth is terror, his entrails are brazen asps, and his bond is like the smyris-stone; the spirit shall not pass through him; in his sneezing brightness is opened; his eyes are like the morning star; from his mouth go forth burning lamps and a ball of fire; his nostrils breathe out the smoke of a furnace of burning fire; his soul is the flames of coals, and fires proceed from his tongue; in his neck dwells strength, and before him runs destruction;

he is, as the prophet says elsewhere, who counts the rock as stubble and laughs at the earthquake; his bed is sharp potsherds, and all the gold that is, like the sea, is as mire beneath him; he makes the deep boil like a brazen pot, and esteems the strait like a mirror, and the abyss of Tartarus like an eternal captive; there is nothing made on earth like him, that may be mocked by my angels; he sees everything lofty, and he himself is king of all the things that are in the waters. But to us God is Christ Jesus, who said:

All that is under heaven is mine; and the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, appeared in the midst of the golden candlesticks, like to the Son of man, clothed in a robe reaching to the feet and girt about at the breasts with a golden girdle; and the hairs of his head were white as wool and as snow, and, as it is written, his eyes were as a flame of fire, and his feet like fine brass cast forth from a furnace, and his voice as the voice of many waters; and in his right hand he holds seven stars, and out of his mouth goes a sword sharp on both sides, and his face is as the sun shining in his strength. This is he who has the keys of death and of hell; this is he whose name is written on a new white stone, which no one has except him who has received it.

For if we cause no stumbling-block to the schismatics, in that we read the name God inscribed on the new stone—who, in every letter, whether Hebrew or Latin or Greek, in everything that is seen or spoken, is King of kings and Lord of lords—in which tongues, even though the title of the cross is set up, yet a divine testimony is lettered to God, as also in the prophets of God; wherein Jeremiah, with the character of the Hebrew letter set before him, wept in lamentations, and David exulted in psalms, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess to God. For he it is of whom it is written: The lion of the tribe of Judah has prevailed;

but to us the lion is not God; rather, as it is written, 'What is sweeter than honey, and what is stronger than a lion?' He is of whom it is written: Let the hart of friendship and the colt of graces speak to you; but to us neither the hart nor the colt is God, but, as it is written: Before you say 'Lord, Lord,' he says, Behold, I am present; and as elsewhere: Out of the mouth of sucklings you have prepared praise. He it is who, as it is written in the prophet, alone is able to bind together the band of the Pleiades and to unloose the enclosures of Orion, knowing the changing of the firmament and destroying the wheel of generation; by the renewal of baptism he has conquered the day of our birth;

he it is whose name made a way in the sea and a most sure path in the floods, to whose name the burning fire of the furnace yielded, overcome. Whom even Balaam, a worshipper of idols and of demons, prophesied as a testimony to his own wretchedness, saying: A man shall go forth from the seed of Judah and shall rule over many nations, and his kingdom shall be exalted; for the Lord God brought him out of Egypt; his horns are as the honor of the unicorn; he shall devour the nations of his enemies, and shall pick clean their elbows, and with his darts he shall shake his enemies, and resting he shall be refreshed like a lion and like a lion's whelp; who shall rouse him up? They that bless him are blessed, and they that curse him are cursed. Although his words, on account of what he was,

—he himself, among the prophecies of the righteous, no one would have received—yet Scripture judged it a wicked thing that anything be barred from the Lord's Scriptures and condemned, whatever they also prophesied of this kind unto the testimony of God Christ, as it is written: Though wickedness be timid, it gives testimony to God, being condemned; and elsewhere: You believe that there is one God; this the demons also do, and they tremble. And if they desire to know what is the name which gives to every power and to every tongue the work of its might, this is it: that it is Christ Jesus, as it is written: Gold and silver I have not; but what I have, this I give you; in the name of Jesus rise and walk; as also elsewhere: I am the Lord God, this is my name; my glory I will not give to another;

and elsewhere, John saying: And his garment was sprinkled with blood, and his name was called the Word of God; and elsewhere: Behold, a virgin shall conceive in the womb and shall bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel, which is interpreted, God with us. Turn back, therefore, at last, wretched schismatic, turn back, and dread the name of the Lord, which even the whole nature of beasts and wild animals has feared, because it is written: It must needs be that scandals come, but woe to him through whom they shall be wrought; for would that you were either crafty or cold, but because you are lukewarm, you shall be spewed out of the mouth of the Lord;

but, as it is written, take counsel for yourself and do penance, and buy for yourself gold tried in the fire, that what you have bought, having become as gold refined by fire, the name of the Lord, which is Jesus, may be written in you, when in the things you do in penance you show forth the name of the Lord the Savior—because through him you have been saved—since it is written: And his name shall be called Jesus, for this is he who shall save all the people; and understand parables and obscure sayings and the utterances of the prudent and dark things, because he is mighty who said:

When you are converted and groan, then you shall be saved; for our God, who from the beginning, saving his people in manifold and many ways, showed it to our fathers in deed, coming in the flesh, manifested it, being called by name Jesus. But if anyone thinks otherwise, he shall bear judgment, whoever he be; for to them, as is said by the wretched, God is supposed to be male-female: but to us the Spirit of God is both in males and in females, as it is written: God made man after his own image and likeness, male and female; he made them and blessed them; as also the Apostle says of him: Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God;

of whom, since we are men, and he himself is a man and our head, the Apostle promised to present us, betrothed in the faith, to the one husband, a chaste virgin, because there is neither male nor female, but we are all one in Christ Jesus. To them, therefore, let everything they read be confusion; to us, instruction to understand what is written, and to know the power of the living Word. It is no task to estimate the nature of the divine discourse by an erratic and carnal sense, in the confusible figures of carnal luxuries, but, as it is written, the invisible things of God can be known from the creation of the world through the things that are made.

For these are they who, wearing the stained tunic of the flesh, have turned the grace of the divine word into lusts, and despise dominions, blaspheme dignities, contemn prophecies, deny the resurrection; as it is written: Going more and more after the desires of the flesh, they contemn godliness, hardened by audacity, and on account of their unanimity, since they are ungodly, they do not fear to blaspheme—those upon whom perdition shall not slumber. But to us, who know that there is no other name under heaven given among men except Christ Jesus, in which it behooves us to be saved, neither Armaziel nor Mariame nor Joel nor Balsamus nor Barbilon is God, but Christ Jesus, of whom it is written:

And let all the angels of God worship him; and he it is who makes his angels spirits and his ministers a burning fire, and all things in all are fulfilled; and he it is the seed which was promised, ordained through angels in the hand of a mediator; he it is who is above all principality and power and might and dominion and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come; he it is who is our God, nor shall any other be reckoned besides him, who is the head over every church, which is his body and his fullness, who fills all and in all. But whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or things present or things to come:

all are ours, and we are Christ's, and Christ is God's. And this is the one judgment of us all: that whether prophets or apostles or angels—if anything be uttered by anyone, by whatever name—if it prophesies or preaches Christ as God, and according to Moses and the prophets and the gospels, condemning the vices of the world, speaks God, if it consents to the catholic faith, we embrace it;

but if—which is a wicked thing—it denies that Jesus is God, and, dissenting from Moses, the gospels, or the prophets, persuades to the sacrileges of wretched dogmas, which is not lawful, then neither prophet nor apostle nor angel, even though he set before himself a holy name, but he is held by us as anathema and a fugitive, as it is written: that no one in the Holy Spirit says anathema to Jesus, and no one save in the Holy Spirit calls Jesus Lord; as also John says: Every spirit that confesses that Christ Jesus has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that dissolves Jesus is not of God, and this is antichrist; as also he himself says elsewhere: They who do not confess that Christ Jesus has come in the flesh, these are seducers and antichrists.

As also Joshua son of Nun, the Lord's prophet and leader in Israel, when an angel appeared to him, believing not in the mere appearance but in the confessions of words, cried out to the angel: Are you ours or our adversaries'? And he, that faith might be given to his words, confessed himself to be the prince of the host of the Lord; and so it came to pass that Joshua, who would believe nothing apart from God, then gave faith to the words of the angel speaking to him, when that one had not denied that he was of the host of the Lord. As also to John the apostle in the Apocalypse, when he wished to worship the angel speaking to him, it was shown that God, not angels, is to be worshipped, the angel saying to him: Do it not, John; for I am your fellow-servant and of your brethren who have the testimony;

worship Jesus as God! For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy; as also Isaiah says: Neither a messenger nor an angel, but the Lord himself shall come and shall save us. But if any are puffed up, knowing nothing, and beyond the four gospels either feign or confess some fifth gospel, why is this brought forth to the reproach of us who reject the wretchednesses of such things? For these are they in whom the god of this age has blinded the senses of the unbelieving, that the illumination of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should not shine forth in them; and let all the wrath of the Lord come upon him who either writes this in titles or confesses or believes it.

But we, having entered the body of the venerable church of God through the creed, have come to know the indissoluble faith—watered by one threefold fount—in the arrangement of the four gospels, believing that there is no other God except Christ God, the Son of God, who, crucified for us, showed in his own name the baptism of remission, predestining from the beginning of the world in prophecy his elect, from whom Christ according to the flesh—as also the lineage of the Lord in the gospel, arranged and proclaimed through them, is held—through whom the Lord, prophesying himself, prepared the way of his coming, as it is written:

I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh, and their sons and daughters shall prophesy, and their young men shall see visions, and their old men shall dream dreams; and indeed upon my menservants and maidservants I will pour out of my Spirit, and I will give wonders in heaven above and signs on the earth beneath; the sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood, before the great day of the Lord come; and it shall be: whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. Wherein we too do not despair of speaking concerning him, because, prohibiting and intercepting no one's spirit, he has not shut it up with a fixed limit of prophecy, but has granted that all who believe in him may speak freely of him; as it is also written in the gospel:

Blessed be God who has visited and wrought redemption for his people, and has raised up a horn in the house of David, as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets who have been from of old; as also Tobit the prophet says to his son: We, son, are sons of the prophets; Noah was a prophet, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and all our fathers who from the beginning of the world prophesied; as also Jude the apostle says: Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, 'Behold, the Lord comes with his holy thousands to execute judgment'; as also the apostle, shutting the way of speaking about God to no one, when he wrote to the peoples to whom he preached: You can, he says, each one prophesy, that all may learn and all be exhorted; but also elsewhere:

The spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets, that whoever should believe in God Christ might have no despair of prophesying concerning God, in that which he had promised to all his own. And therefore, most blessed bishops, if, with the heresies and dogmas damned and the faith set forth in a clear declaration, you think satisfaction has been made both to God and to yourselves, then, giving testimony to the truth, absolve us from the envy of malicious detraction, and, reporting to your brethren those things which belong to the slanderers, heal the things harassed by the words of evil-speakers; for it is the fruit of life to be approved by those who seek the faith of the truth, not by those who, under the name of religious men, pursue domestic enmities. And although the catholic faith, possessing the way of the creed given by God,

seeks rather the glory of believing than of speaking, since the things which are brought forth by their own truth do not require an ingenious skill of interpretation, as the Apostle says: Avoid the contentions of the law; yet, compelled by the necessity of the time, which the injury inflicted upon us through Bishop Hydatius imposed—although we have always followed the part of patience, and it has been our endeavor rather to bear with someone than to provoke—we rejoice that the reason of things has so come about that, before you, who are the elder of us all and have come, nourished by the experiences of life, to the glory of the apostolic see, with blessed Peter as exhorter, we may speak what we believe, fulfilling before you the faith of the apostolic word which says: With the heart one believes unto righteousness, but with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.

Wherein we also, baptized into Christ, putting on Christ, and—the faith of the truth being lofty indeed in its manifold arrangement, yet venerable in the united power of the one God—as we believe with the heart, so unto the salvation of all who by the false-speaking of words have been sent into stumbling, we confess. For when, several years ago, restored by the regeneration of the living laver, and rejecting the squalid darkness of secular doings, we had given ourselves wholly to God—reading that whoever should love anyone more than God could not be his disciple—some of us, already elected to God in the churches, others laboring in life that we might be elected, we followed the quiet of catholic peace;

but when suddenly contentions arose, whether from necessary refutation, or from rivalry of life, or from the power of the last time, we, desiring the love of Christ God and peace—even though in conscience we were confident—nevertheless feared lest, as has happened, the contention of minds should bring about something that ecclesiastical peace would not contain. Yet thanks to God, who is one and true in all, that, amid these things, none of us who handed in this booklet has up to this time been able to have either an accuser of a still reprehensible life, or a judge—although to be detracted from is not always the lot of the guilty, but is sometimes the lot of the quiet.

Finally, in the episcopal assembly which was held at Caesaraugusta, none of us is held to have been made a defendant, none accused, none convicted, none condemned; no crime was laid against our name or purpose or life; no one had—I will not say the necessity—but not even the anxiety of being summoned. Some commonitorium, I know not what, was given there by Hydatius, which laid down as it were a discipline for the conduct of life: no one of us was reprehended there amid those proceedings, your letter against the wicked above all prevailing, in which, according to the gospel commands, you had enjoined that nothing should be decreed against the absent and the unheard.

Yet we, although we were absent there, have always admonished, and do admonish, in the churches: that wicked morals and unseemly manners of living, or those things which fight against the faith of Christ God, be condemned by the love of a commendable and Christian life; nor to forbid, if anyone, despising parents, children, possessions, dignity, and even his own soul, has chosen rather to love God

than the world; nor to take away the hope of pardon from those who, if they do not seek the things which are first, yet stand in the middle or third places, since, many mansions being set with God the Father, if the faith of the creed be kept uncorrupted, the hope set before us in Christ ought to be held, even if they have not the means of fulfilling the perfect work, following the apostle Paul, who said that he commanded some according to authority, admonished others according to indulgence, and informed others by counsel without the authority of command, that he might gain all who had come to the faith of Christ by the diverse calling of mercy. But the faith, as we have received it, so also we hold and hand down, believing in one God the Father almighty, as it is written:

From whom are all things, and we through him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, as it is written: Through whom are all things, and we through him; born of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit, as it is written: Behold, a virgin shall conceive in the womb and shall bear a son, and you shall call his name Emmanuel, which is interpreted, God with us; and again concerning him: The Holy Spirit shall come upon you and the power of the Most High shall overshadow you, and therefore also that which shall be born holy shall be called the Son of God; who suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, as it is written: And he shall be reckoned among the wicked; was buried, on the third day rose again, as it is written in the prophets:

Wait for me unto the day of my resurrection; ascended into the heavens, sits at the right hand of God the Father almighty, as it is written: Behold, I saw the heavens opened and the Son of man sitting at the right hand of God; from thence to come and to judge the living and the dead, as it is written: So shall he come as you have seen him going into heaven; believing in the holy church, the Holy Spirit, the saving baptism, as it is written: Unless one be born again of water and the Holy Spirit, he shall not ascend into the kingdoms of heaven; believing in the remission of sins, as it is written: I say to you, little children, that your sins are forgiven you for his name's sake; believing in the resurrection of the flesh, as it is written: