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| Chapter XLVII.
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Chapter
XLVII.
Unless I am utterly mistaken, there is nothing so old as
the truth; and the already proved antiquity of the divine writings is
so far of use to me, that it leads men more easily to take it in that
they are the treasure-source whence all later wisdom has been taken.
And were it not necessary to keep my work to a moderate size, I might
launch forth also into the proof of this. What poet or sophist has not
drunk at the fountain of the prophets? Thence, accordingly, the
philosophers watered their arid minds, so that it is the things they
have from us which bring us
into comparison with them. For this reason, I imagine, philosophy was
banished by certain states—I mean by the Thebans, by the Spartans
also, and the Argives—its disciples sought to imitate our
doctrines; and ambitious, as I have said, of glory and eloquence alone,
if they fell upon anything in the collection of sacred Scriptures which
displeased them, in their own peculiar style of research, they
perverted it to serve their purpose: for they had no adequate faith in
their divinity to keep them from changing them, nor had they any
sufficient understanding of them, either, as being still at the time
under veil—even obscure to the Jews themselves, whose peculiar
possession they seemed to be. For so, too, if the truth was
distinguished by its simplicity, the more on that account the
fastidiousness of man, too proud to believe, set to altering it; so
that even what they found certain they made uncertain by their
admixtures. Finding a simple revelation of God, they proceeded to
dispute about Him, not as He had revealed to them, but turned aside to
debate about His properties, His nature, His abode. Some assert Him to
be incorporeal; others maintain He has a body,—the Platonists
teaching the one doctrine, and the Stoics the other. Some think
that He is composed of atoms, others of numbers: such are the different
views of Epicurus and Pythagoras. One thinks He is made of fire; so it
appeared to Heraclitus. The Platonists, again, hold that He administers
the affairs of the world; the Epicureans, on the contrary, that He is
idle and inactive, and, so to speak, a nobody in human things. Then the
Stoics represent Him as placed outside the world, and whirling round
this huge mass from without like a potter; while the Platonists place
Him within the world, as a pilot is in the ship he steers. So, in like
manner, they differ in their views about the world itself, whether it
is created or uncreated, whether it is destined to pass away or to
remain for ever. So again it is debated concerning the nature of the
soul, which some contend is divine and eternal, while others hold that
it is dissoluble. According to each one’s fancy, He has
introduced either something new, or refashioned the old. Nor need we
wonder if the speculations of philosophers have perverted the older
Scriptures. Some of their brood, with their opinions, have even
adulterated our new-given Christian revelation, and corrupted it into a
system of philosophic doctrines, and from the one path have struck off
many and inexplicable by-roads.145
| 145 [See Irenæus, vol.
i. p. 377 this Series.] | And I have alluded to
this, lest any one becoming acquainted with the variety of parties
among us, this might seem to him to put us on a level with the
philosophers, and he might condemn the truth from the different ways in
which it is defended. But we at once put in a plea in bar against these
tainters of our purity, asserting that this is the rule of truth which
comes down from Christ by transmission through His companions, to whom
we shall prove that those devisers of different doctrines are all
posterior. Everything opposed to the truth has been got up from the
truth itself, the spirits of error carrying on this system of
opposition. By them all corruptions of wholesome discipline have been
secretly instigated; by them, too, certain fables have been introduced,
that, by their resemblance to the truth, they might impair its
credibility, or vindicate their own higher claims to faith; so that
people might think Christians unworthy of credit because the poets or
philosophers are so, or might regard the poets and philosophers as
worthier of confidence from their not being followers of Christ.
Accordingly, we get ourselves laughed at for proclaiming that God will
one day judge the world. For, like us, the poets and philosophers set
up a judgment-seat in the realms below. And if we threaten
Gehenna, which is a reservoir of secret fire under the earth for
purposes of punishment, we have in the same way derision heaped on us.
For so, too, they have their Pyriphlegethon, a river of flame in the
regions of the dead. And if we speak of Paradise,146
the place of heavenly bliss appointed to receive the spirits of the
saints, severed from the knowledge of this world by that fiery zone as
by a sort of enclosure, the Elysian plains have taken possession of
their faith. Whence is it, I pray you have all this, so like us, in the
poets and philosophers? The reason simply is, that they have been
taken from our religion. But if they are taken from our sacred things,
as being of earlier date, then ours are the truer, and have higher
claims upon belief, since even their imitations find faith among you.
If they maintain their sacred mysteries to have sprung from their own
minds, in that case ours will be reflections of what are later than
themselves, which by the nature of things is impossible, for never does
the shadow precede the body which casts it, or the image the
reality.147
| 147 True, in the sense that
a shadow cannot be projected by a body not yet existent. | E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
