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| What St. Paul Calls Spiritual Wickednesses Displayed by Pagan Authors, and by Heretics, in No Dissimilar Manner. Holy Scripture Especially Liable to Heretical Manipulation. Affords Material for Heresies, Just as Virgil Has Been the Groundwork of Literary Plagiarisms, Different in Purport from the Original. PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP
Chapter
XXXIX.—What St. Paul Calls Spiritual Wickednesses Displayed by
Pagan Authors, and by Heretics, in No Dissimilar Manner. Holy Scripture
Especially Liable to Heretical Manipulation. Affords Material for
Heresies, Just as Virgil Has Been the Groundwork of Literary
Plagiarisms, Different in Purport from the Original.
These were the ingenious arts of “spiritual
wickednesses,”2259 wherewith we also,
my brethren, may fairly expect to have “to wrestle,” as
necessary for faith, that the elect may be made manifest, (and) that
the reprobate may be discovered. And therefore they possess influence,
and a facility in thinking out and fabricating2260
errors, which ought not to be wondered at as if it were a difficult and
inexplicable process, seeing that in profane writings also an example
comes ready to hand of a similar facility. You see in our own day,
composed out of Virgil,2261
2261 Oehler reads “ex
Vergilio,” although the Codex Agobard. as
“ex Virgilio.” | a story of a wholly
different character, the subject-matter being arranged according to the
verse, and the verse according to the subject-matter. In
short,2262
2262 Denique.
[“Getica lyra.”] | Hosidius Geta has
most completely pilfered his tragedy of Medea from Virgil. A
near relative of my own, among some leisure productions2263 of his pen, has composed out of the same
poet The Table of Cebes. On the same principle, those
poetasters are commonly called Homerocentones,
“collectors of Homeric odds and ends,” who stitch into one
piece, patchwork fashion, works of their own from the lines of Homer,
out of many scraps put together from this passage and from that (in
miscellaneous confusion). Now, unquestionably, the Divine Scriptures
are more fruitful in resources of all kinds for this sort of facility.
Nor do I risk contradiction in saying2264
2264 Nec periclitor dicere.
[Truly, a Tertullianic paradox; but compare 2 Pet. iii. 16. N.B.
Scripture the test of heresy.] |
that the very Scriptures were even arranged by the will of God in such
a manner as to furnish materials for heretics, inasmuch as I read that
“there must be heresies,”2265
which there cannot be without the Scriptures.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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