CHAPTER XLVII.

Philosophers have derived their wisdom from our Scriptures, which they have distorted, and they have vainly speculated on subjects not revealed. Heretics similarly have corrupted the New Testament. Many of our doctrines have been anticipatorily counterfeited by the agency of evil spirits.

FOR the antiquity of the divine writings already established bears out this point of my argument, from which it may easily be believed that they were the [134] source of all later wisdom. And if I were not anxious to limit the size of this book, I might run on into a proof of this. What poet, what sophist can you name who did not drink at the fountain of the prophets? It was at that spring that the philosophers watered the dryness of their own intellect; for it is on this very ground of their resemblance to us in certain tenets that people liken us to them. And this, of course, was the reason why philosophy was banished by certain laws,—the Theban, Spartan, and Argive for instance. And whilst they endeavour to imitate our doctrines, yet, being men desirous, as we have said, of fame and eloquence only, they transcribed according to the bent of their own meddlesome fancy anything in the Holy Scriptures at which they took offence, and turned it to their own purposes, neither sufficiently crediting their divine origin, so as to refrain from falsifying them, nor sufficiently understanding their present semi-obscurity; being, as they are, dark even to the Jews themselves, to whom they seemed peculiarly to belong. For even where the truth existed in its simplicity, there the more did the restlessness of human perversity, despising faith, waver, and thereby confuse into obscurity even what was at first clear. For they disputed about God, Whose existence simply they found revealed, not as they found Him revealed, but proceeded rather to discuss His quality, His nature, and His abode. Some assert that He is incorporeal, others corporeal, as the Platonists and the Stoics respectively; some that He is derived from atoms, others from numbers, as Epicurus and [135] Pythagoras respectively; while others thought that He is derived from fire, as was the opinion of Heraclitus : the Platonists, too, regard Him as being interested in the affairs of the world; the Epicuraeans on the other hand represent Him as inactive and inert, and, if I may so speak, a nonentity as regards human affairs. The Stoics indeed ¹²³ thought that He was placed outside the world, and directed the motion of the universe from an external position, like a potter that of his wheel; but the Platonists, that He was placed within it, and remained in that which He governs, like a pilot in the ship which he steers.

And also concerning the world itself they differed as to whether it was created or uncreated; whether it would have an end or last for ever: so, too, concerning the state of the soul, some contend that it is divine and eternal, others that it can be dissolved: as each one thought, so he either brought forth a fresh opinion, or remodelled an old one.

Nor can one wonder if the ingenuity of the philosophers has perverted the Old Testament, for certain men of their stock have, by their own opinions, adulterated even our New Testament also, in order to bring it into accord with their philosophic doctrines; and have cut many oblique and intricate paths away from the one way. I have added this remark lest the well-known differences in our sect should seem to any one to furnish another point of similarity between the philosophers and ourselves, and lest any one should [136] condemn the truth on account of the variety of its defences. But we at once lodge this preliminary objection against those adulterators of our doctrines, —that the Rule of Truth is that which comes from Christ, handed down through those who accompanied Him, long after Whom, all these different inventors of novelties will be proved to have lived ¹²⁴.

Every attack upon the truth has been constructed from the truth itself, the spirits of error working out that antagonism. By them the corruptions of this kind of wholesome doctrine have been brought in: by them certain stories have been promulgated in order, from their similarity to it, to weaken the credibility of the truth, or rather to entirely monopolize the claim to it; and so to lead one to think that credence ought not to be given to the Christians, because it cannot be given to poets and philosophers; or else that more credence ought to be given to poets and philosophers, because none can be given to the Christians. Consequently we are ridiculed when we preach that God will come to judgement. For in like manner both poets and philosophers place a tribunal in the lower world. If we threaten gehenna, which is a subterranean store of secret fire for purposes of [137] punishment, we are laughed at in the same way. For so, too, is there the river Pyriphlegethon for the dead. If, again, we mention Paradise, a place of celestial delight, appointed for the reception of the spirits of the saints, and separated from the knowledge of the world in general by a kind of partition formed by that fiery zone, the Elysian fields have already anticipated the belief. Whence, I pray you, have the philosophers derived these doctrines so similar to ours, except from our mysteries? and if from our mysteries, then ours, as the earlier, are the more trustworthy, and ought the rather to be believed, since even their counterfeits find credit: but if from their own inventions, then our doctrines must be held to be the counterfeits of something later than themselves, which is contrary to the nature of things; for never does shadow precede substance, or the copy its original.