EXCERPTS FROM TERTULLIAN
EXCERPTS FROM EARLY CHURCH FATHERS
Tertullian
against heretics
20. Compendium
of unsound teachings.
21. Concerning the Valentinians.
22. On the introduction of another divinity above the Biblical God.
23. On the Christ of the Creator.
24. Concerning the doctrines of Hermogenes.
21. CONCERNING THE VALENTINIANS
One man perverts the Scriptures with his hand, another their meaning by his exposition. For although Valentinus seems to use the entire volume, he has none the less laid violent hands on the truth only with a more cunning mind and skill than Marcion. Marcion expressly and openly used the knife, not the pen, since he made such an excision of the Scriptures as suited his own subject-matter. Valentinus, however, abstained from such excision, because he did not invent Scriptures to square with his own subject-matter, but adapted his matter to the Scriptures; and yet he took away more, and added more, by removing the proper meaning of every particular word, and adding fantastic arrangements of things which have no real existence (De praescriptione haereticorum, 38).
We know, I say, most fully their actual origin, and we are quite aware why we call them Valentinians, although they affect to disavow their name. They have departed, it is true, from their founder, yet is their origin by no means destroyed; and even if it chance to be changed, the very change bears testimony to the fact ... Ptolemaeus afterwards entered on the same path, by distinguishing the names and the numbers of the Aeons into personal substances, which, however, he kept apart from God. Valentinus had included these in the very essence of the Deity, as senses and affections of motion (Adversus Valentinianos, 4).
Nor shall we hear it said of us from any quarter, that we have of our own mind fashioned our own materials, since these have been already produced, both in respect of the opinions and their refutations, in carefully written volumes, by so many eminently holy and excellent men, not only those who have lived before us, but those also who were contemporary with the heresiarchs themselves: for instance Justin, philosopher and martyr; Miltiades, the sophist of the churches Irenaeus, that very exact inquirer into all doctrines; our own Proculus, the model of chaste old age and Christian eloquence. All these it would be my desire closely to follow in every work of faith, even as in this particular one. Now if there are no heresies at all but what those who refute them are supposed to have fabricated, then the apostle who predicted them must have been guilty of falsehood. If, however, there are heresies, they can be no other than those which are the subject of discussion. No writer can be supposed to have so much time on his hands as to fabricate materials which are already in his possession. (Adversus Valentinianos, 5).
Therefore she (Achamoth) applies herself solely to the animal nature, adducing the instructions of Soter (for her guidance). And first of all (she does) what cannot be described and read, and heard of, without an intense horror at the blasphemy thereof: she produces this God of ours, the God of all except of the heretics, the Father and Creator and King of all things, which are inferior to him ... they call him Father in relation to the animal substances to which they give the place of honour on his fight hand; whereas, in respect of the material substances which they banish to his left hand, they name him Demiurgus; whilst his title King designates his authority over both classes, nay over the universe (Adversus Valentinianos, 18).
The Demiurge therefore, placed as he was without the limits of the Pleroma in the ignominious solitude of his eternal exile, rounded a new empire -this world (of ours)- by clearing away the confusion and distinguishing the difference between the two substances which severally constituted it, the animal and the material. Out of incorporeal (elements) he constructs bodies, heavy, light, erect and stooping, celestial and terrene. He then completes the sevenfold stages of heaven itself, with his own throne above all. Whence he had the additional name of Sabbatum from the hebdomadal nature of his abode; his mother Achamoth, too, had the title Ogdoada, after the precedent of the primeval Ogdoad (Adversus Valentinianos, 20).
Besides, the Demiurge had so little mastery over things, on the score, you must know, of his inability to approach spiritual essences, (constituted as he was) of animal elements, that, imagining himself to be the only being, he uttered this soliloquy: "I am God, and beside me there is none else." (Adversus Valentinianos, 21).
Their most eminent powers, moreover, they confine within the following limits, as in a citadel. In the most elevated of all summits presides the tricenary Pleroma, Horos marking off its boundary line. Beneath it, Achamoth occupies the intermediate space for her abode, treading down her son. For under her comes the Demiurge in his own Hebdomad, or rather the Devil, sojourning in this world in common with ourselves, formed, as has been said above, of the same elements and the same body, out of the most profitable calamities of Sophia; inasmuch as, (if it had not been for these, ) our spirit would have had no space for inhaling and ejecting air-that delicate vest of all corporeal creatures, that revealer of all colours, that instrument of the seasons-if the sadness of Sophia had not filtered it, just as her fear did the animal existence, and her conversion the Demiurge himself (Adversus Valentinianos, 23).
Even the Demiurge has a Christ of His own -His natural Son. An animal, in short, produced by Himself, proclaimed by the prophets ... Moreover, there was even in Christ accruing from Achamoth the condiment of a spiritual seed, in order of course to prevent the corruption of all the other stuffing. For after the precedent of the principal Tetrad, they guard him with four substances-the spiritual one of Achamoth, the animal one of the Demiurge, the corporeal one, which cannot be described, and that of Soter, or, in other phrase, the columbine. As for Soter (Jesus), he remained in Christ to the last, impassible, incapable of injury, incapable of apprehension (Adversus Valentinianos, 27).
Whereas the material class-in other words, those which are bad souls-they say, never receive the blessings of salvation; for that nature they have pronounced to be incapable of any change or reform in its natural condition. This grain, then, of spiritual seed is modest and very small when cast from her hand, but under her instruction increases and advances into full conviction ... and these even now, if they have once attained to a full and complete knowledge of these foolish conceits of theirs, since they are already naturalized in the fraternal bond of the spiritual state, will obtain a sure salvation, nay, one which is on all accounts their due (Adversus Valentinianos, 29).
For this reason it is that they neither regard works as necessary for themselves, nor do they observe any of the calls of duty, eluding even the necessity of martyrdom on any pretence which may suit their pleasure ... As for them, however, they may prove their nobility by the dissoluteness of their life and their diligence in sin, since Achamoth fawns on them as her own; for she, too, found sin no unprofitable pursuit. (Adversus Valentinianos, 30).
But I, too, am no doubt a rash man, in having exposed: so great a mystery in so derisive a way: I ought to be afraid that Achamoth, who did not choose to make herself known even to her own son, would turn mad, that Theletus would be enraged, that Fortune would be irritated. But I am yet a liege-man of the Demiurge (Adversus Valentinianos, 32).
And so it happens that the doctrines which have grown up amongst the Valentinians have already extended their rank growth to the woods of the Gnostics (Adversus Valentinianos, 39).
The hive of Valentinus fortifies the soul with the germ of Sophia, or Wisdom; by means of which germ they recognise, in the images of visible objects, the stories and Milesian fables of their own Aeons. I am sorry from my heart that Plato has been the caterer to all these heretics (De anima, 23).
For, as I have read in some writer of Valentinus' wretched faction, they refuse at the outset to believe that a human and earthly substance was created for Christ, lest the Lord should be regarded as inferior to the angels, who are not formed of earthly flesh; whence, too, it would be necessary that, if His flesh were like ours, it should be similarly born, not of the Spirit, nor of God, but of the will of man. Why, moreover, should it be born, not of corruptible [seed], but of incorruptible? Why, again, since His flesh has both risen and returned to heaven, is not ours, being like His, also taken up at once? (De carne Christi, 15).
Tertullian is traditionally regarded as a fiery apologist of unknown biography who burst into Latin Christianity, in the reign of Septimius Severus, with a number of remarkable treatises that he composed over a relatively short period of time, after which he fizzled out for the rest of his long-lasting life. Surprisingly, he focused his attacks on a Greek painter, and also fought some other unfamiliar character that could not share his admiration for a strange group of visionaries who lived in Phrygia long time since. Some less demanding section of the clergy unleashed his fury no less than an otherwise unrecorded persecution of Christians. Not only himself but also his epoch is elusive. Ruthless opponents of the bishop Cyprian, who fled Carthage when Decius launched his anti-Christian campaign, followed his guidelines in a religious confrontation closely mirroring the subsequent Donatist controversy that flared up in Africa after Diocletian’s resignation. Following his unrelenting defence of the orthodox stance and his proscription of all heretics, at some point in time he supposedly forsook the Church Catholic to follow the ridiculous directions and put up with the frivolities of a gang of false prophets. Such two hardly compatible stages in his career were not successive but widely overlapping.
A quite different approach is presented in Did Tertullian really exist? Did Cyprian? Did Hippolytus? according to which the efforts of early 4th-century African and Roman rigorists, forcefully denouncing an entrenched ecclesiastical body intent on preserving its former privileged position in the Church in spite of the disappointing behaviour of many of its members in times of harassment, along with the reaction of the hierarchical organization under attack, gave rise to the purported works of their respective literary champions, which conveniently came down from the preceding century to the assistance of Donatists and Caecilianists.