Heretics

For you stripped first in the arena of piety, and beat off many trials of heretical wrestlings, and endured the great burning heat of the trials — both you who are the chief men of the church, to whom the service of the altar has been entrusted, and the individuals of the people, and the more powerful.

and I had much thanks to God, if any at all in the Asian region are outside the harm of the heretics.

for I see him occupied in other things, soul and body, night and day), but he is at any rate fond of heretics, loving them no more than he hates us.

By which account is solved the difficulty raised against us by the heretics, whether Adam was moulded perfect or imperfect.

" What against this voice do the heresies still utter, when the Scripture proclaims the Almighty to be a good God and guiltless of vice and injustice—if indeed ignorance arises through not knowing, but God does nothing absurd?

And I will pass over the doctrines of philosophy in silence, since those who divided up the heresies confess in writing — that they may not be convicted of ingratitude — that they took the most authoritative of their doctrines from Socrates.

Nor need we dwell longer on this, except on account of the heretics who stuff into the soul some spiritual seed I know not what, conferred out of the hidden bounty of their mother Sophia, without the Maker's knowledge — whereas Scripture, more conscious of its Maker, who is its own God, has promulgated nothing further than that God breathed into the face of man the breath of life, and that man bec …

then we should have no dealings at all with the philosophers concerning the soul either — those, so to speak, who are the patriarchs of the heretics.

I grieve, in good faith, that Plato has been made the caterer of all the heretics.

So the heretics provoke us to play the rhetorician as well as the philosopher.

In short, no others begrudge salvation to the bodily substance except the heretics of another divinity.

And so the heretics begin at once from there, and build their first foundation there, and afterwards build in between — from that point at which they know minds are easily caught, the agreeable fellowship of the senses.

whomever you see to be a heretic (*zindīq*), an enemy of God Most High, then fear God concerning him, and shed his blood seeking the face of God Most High — after you have taken counsel of your own heart and sought God's guidance about him.

[12] (1) The zindīq who makes an outward show of Islam while persisting in the insinuation of his poisons among the Muslims:

And the Muslims have proceeded to adopt Mālik's word whenever the affair of the anarchic heretics grew rank and it was not possible to repel their evils by the word of the remaining imams:

For the sake of brevity, against heretics we are accustomed to make a prescription from the lateness of their teaching.

And so it took for itself occasions from certain words, as is generally the custom of heretics to wrest whatever is simple.

For I hear from Hermogenes and the rest of the materialist heretics that that earth was formless and invisible and rough, but that this our earth has likewise obtained from God both form and aspect and adornment — therefore made other than was that out of which it was made.

But another little book will sustain this argument against heretics — that they may be refuted even without examining their doctrines, on the ground that they are what they are by the very fact of their novelty.

I believe, according to the perversity, he would have revealed them such as Marcion's Christ ought to have been, or any others with him than his own prophets.

A shameless enough Antithesis, when it commits things so diverse — little ones and boys, an age yet innocent and one already capable of judgement, which could insult, not to say blaspheme.

I come, therefore, to that point which both our own people put forward to enter upon curiosity, and the heretics urge to import scrupulousness.

Not otherwise do heresies derive their strength from the infirmities of certain men, having no strength when they meet a faith that is in good health.

Even if the heretics were not enemies of the truth, so that we were not forewarned to flee them, what sort of thing is it to confer with men who themselves profess that they are still seeking?

For the rest, if from the awareness by which we know that the name of God and of Lord befits both the Father and the Son and the Spirit, we were to name gods and lords, we should be quenching our torches, the more timid even toward martyrdom, with whom an occasion of escaping would lie open on every side, by their swearing at once by gods and lords — as do certain heretics, whose gods are many.

As to the other powers, alone — fortifying himself beforehand against the conjectures of heretics, who will have the world built by angels and diverse powers, who even make the Creator himself either an angel, or subject in respect to other things outside, as the works of the world, and even suborned in his ignorance.

also on account of the heretics, who, as the nations with their hands, so they too with their words fashion idols — that is, another god and another Christ.

But heretics have no share in our discipline, whom the very taking-away of communion testifies to be strangers.

For is there any difference between them, except that the heathen, by not believing, believe, while the heretics, by believing, do not believe?

And so they reproach the discipline of monogamy as a heresy, and for no other cause are they more compelled to deny the Paraclete than because they suppose him to be the founder of a new discipline, and indeed of one most harsh to them.

The heretics do away with marriage, the natural-minded heap it up.

" So too the heretics assign the same parables whither they will, not, where they ought, most aptly exclude them.

So the heretics, by not believing as proved the things which are foretold, believe those things which were not even foretold.

But those who think that confession is constituted not here — that is, not within this compass of the earth, nor during this voyage of life, nor among the men of this common nature — what a presumption is it against the whole order of things to be undergone in this earth and in this life and under human powers!