Apelles

For that Philumene too rather persuaded Apelles and the rest of Marcion's deserters that Christ did indeed, in good faith, carry about flesh, but of no nativity — having, namely, borrowed it from the elements.

This Apelles ought to have remembered, the emendator of the disciple Marcion.

The Holy Spirit had already then foreseen that in a certain virgin Philumene there would be an angel of seduction, transfiguring himself into an angel of light, by whose signs and tricks Apelles, being led on, introduced a new heresy.

But Apelles too will assail me with this pronouncement, and Ebion and Simon, and all in order, have nothing else by which, while insinuating themselves to me, they make me over to themselves.

Part of it Marcion and Apelles and Valentinus, and any others who undermine the resurrection of the flesh, take to themselves.

Let your Pheidias come, and your Polycleitus, and Praxiteles again, and Apelles, and all who pursue the menial crafts, earthy workers of earth.

And Apelles, beholding it, rejoiced at this work of Fortune wrought in his despair of art, and completed the picture not through art but through Fortune.

Apelles relates that the souls were solicited by earthly baits, out of their supercelestial seats, by a fiery angel, the God of Israel and ours, who thereafter molded round them a sinful flesh.

As if, by that same heretical licence, he could not himself have either admitted the flesh and denied the birth, like Apelles his disciple and afterwards his deserter, or, confessing both flesh and birth, interpreted them otherwise, like Valentinus, his fellow-disciple and fellow-deserter.

" We have come, then, as the saying is, "from the lime-kiln into the charcoal-pit," from Marcion to Apelles, who, after he had been brought low in the flesh by a woman, lapsing from Marcion's discipline, and then was overturned in spirit by the virgin Philumene, took up from her the proclamation that Christ's body was solid, but without birth.

By these chapters alone, on which Marcion and Apelles think themselves chiefly equipped, interpreted according to the truth of the entire and uncorrupted gospel, there should have been enough to prove the human flesh in Christ through the defence of the birth.

And therefore, compelled to dispose of Christ in another way lest He be reckoned the Creator's, they first went astray about His very flesh, contending either that it is no true flesh at all (as Marcion and Basilides hold) or that it is of a peculiar quality (as the heresies of Valentinus and Apelles hold).

This useless and trifling little body, which they do not even shrink from calling an evil — though it had been the work of angels (as Menander and Marcus would have it), though it were the construction of some fiery angel as well (as Apelles teaches) — would suffice, by the patronage of a second divinity, to establish the authority of the flesh.

As the gambols of the lambs are to a finished ballet, as the caterwaulings on the roof are to a sonata, as the tattooings of a cannibal are to the paintings of an Apelles, so is the “lust” condemned by the ascetics to the loves of Romeo and Juliet.