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| Chapter V.—Christ and His apostles, without any fraud, deception, or hypocrisy, preached that one God, the Father, was the founder of all things. They did not accommodate their doctrine to the prepossessions of their hearers.
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Chapter V.—Christ and His apostles,
without any fraud, deception, or hypocrisy, preached that one God, the Father,
was the founder of all things. They did not accommodate their doctrine to the
prepossessions of their hearers.
1. Since, therefore,
the tradition from the apostles does thus exist in the Church, and is
permanent among us, let us revert to the Scriptural proof furnished by
those apostles who did also write the Gospel, in which they recorded the
doctrine regarding God, pointing out that our Lord Jesus Christ is the
truth,3324
and that no lie is in Him. As also David
says, prophesying His birth from a virgin, and the resurrection from the
dead, “Truth has sprung out of the earth.”3325
The apostles, likewise, being disciples of the truth, are above
all falsehood; for a lie has no fellowship with the truth, just as
darkness has none with light, but the presence of the one shuts out that
of the other. Our Lord, therefore, being the truth, did not speak lies;
and whom He knew to have taken origin from a defect, He never would have
acknowledged as God, even the God of all, the Supreme King, too, and His
own Father, an imperfect being as a perfect one, an animal one as a
spiritual, Him who was without the Pleroma as Him who was within it.
Neither did His disciples make mention of any other God, or term
any other Lord, except Him, who was truly the God and Lord of all, as
these most vain sophists affirm that the apostles did with hypocrisy
frame their doctrine according to the capacity of their hearers, and gave
answers after the opinions of their questioners,—fabling blind
things for the blind, according to their blindness; for the dull
according to their dulness; for those in error according to their error.
And to those who imagined that the Demiurge alone was God, they preached
him; but to those who are capable of comprehending the unnameable Father,
they did declare the unspeakable mystery through parables and enigmas: so
that the Lord and the apostles exercised the office of teacher not to
further the cause of truth, but even in hypocrisy, and as each individual
was able to receive it!
2. Such [a line of
conduct] belongs not to those who heal, or who give life: it is rather
that of those bringing on diseases, and increasing ignorance; and much
more true than these men shall the law be found, which pronounces every
one accursed who sends the blind man astray in the way. For the apostles,
who were commissioned to find out the wanderers, and to be for sight to
those who saw not, and medicine to the weak, certainly did not address
them in accordance with their opinion at the time, but according to
revealed truth. For no persons of any kind would act properly, if they
should advise blind men, just about to fall over a precipice, to continue
their most dangerous path, as if it were the right one, and as if they
might go on in safety. Or what medical man, anxious to heal a sick
person, would prescribe in accordance with the patient’s whims, and
not according to the requisite medicine? But that the Lord came as the
physician of the sick, He does Himself declare saying, “They that
are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick; I came not to
call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”3326
How then shall the sick be strengthened, or how shall sinners
come to repentance? Is it by persevering in the very same courses? or, on
the contrary, is it by undergoing a great change and reversal of their
former mode of living, by which they have brought upon themselves no
slight amount of sickness, and many sins? But ignorance, the mother of
all these, is driven out by knowledge. Wherefore the Lord used to impart
knowledge to His disciples, by which also it was His practice to heal
those who were suffering, and to keep back sinners from sin. He therefore
did not address them in accordance with their pristine notions, nor did
He reply to them in harmony with the opinion of His questioners, but
according to the doctrine leading to salvation, without hypocrisy or
respect of person.
3. This is also made clear from the words of the Lord,
who did truly reveal the Son of God to those of the circumcision—
Him who had been foretold as Christ by the prophets; that is, He set
Himself forth, who had restored liberty to men, and bestowed on them the
inheritance of incorruption. And again, the apostles taught the Gentiles
that they should leave vain stocks and stones, which they imagined to be
gods, and worship the true God, who had created and made all the human
family, and, by means of His creation, did nourish, increase, strengthen,
and preserve them in being; and that they might look for His Son Jesus
Christ, who redeemed us from apostasy with His own blood, so that we
should also be a sanctified people,—who shall also descend from
heaven in His Father’s power, and pass judgment upon all, and who
shall freely give the good things of God to those who shall have kept His
commandments. He, appearing in these last times, the chief cornerstone,
has gathered into one, and united those that were far off and those that
were near;3327
that is, the circumcision and the
uncircumcision, enlarging Japhet, and placing him in the dwelling of
Shem.3328
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