Against the Valentinians

​The Valentinians, clearly the most numerous association among the heretics, because, being mostly from apostates of the truth, they are easily led to fables and are not frightened by discipline, care for nothing more than to conceal what they preach; if indeed they preach who conceal. The duty of safekeeping is a trickery of conscience. Confusion is preached while religion is asserted. For even those Eleusinian mysteries, themselves a heresy of Attic superstition, are kept silent out of shame. Therefore, they torture the entrance before they seal [initiate longer], when they do not appoint them as epoptae before five years, in order to build up expectation by the suspension of knowledge and thus seem to exhibit as great a majesty as the desire they have pre-constructed. Now follows the duty of silence. What is found late is carefully guarded. But all the divinity in the shrines, all the sighs of the epoptae, all the sealing of the tongue, is that a representation of the male member is revealed. But an allegorical arrangement, putting forward the venerable name of nature, obscures the sacrilege under the protection of a forced figure and excuses the reproach with false images. Therefore, those whom we now target as heretics, shaping most vain and shameful fabrications with the holy names and titles and arguments of the true religion, — clarity being easy from the opportunity of divine abundance, because it is possible to reap many things from many — have made a Valentinian Eleusinia, made holy by enticement, great by silence, and heavenly by mere taciturnity. If you ask in good faith, with a stiff face and raised eyebrows, they say ‘it is deep.’ If you try subtly, they affirm the common faith through bilingual ambiguities. If you hint that you know, they deny whatever they acknowledge; if you fight hand to hand, they scatter their own ruin with foolish simplicity. They do not commit their secrets even to their own disciples before they have made them their own. They have a device by which they persuade before they teach. Truth, however, persuades by teaching, it does not teach by persuading. ​And therefore we are marked as simple among them, as this only, and not also wise; as if wisdom were immediately forced to fail from simplicity, since the Lord joins both: “be prudent as serpents and simple as doves.” Or if we are foolish because we are simple, are they therefore not simple because they are wise? But those who are not simple are most harmful, just as those who are not wise are most foolish. And yet I would prefer my part to be taken with the better fault, if indeed: it is better to know less than to know worse, to err than to deceive. Furthermore, the face of God is seen in the simplicity of seeking, as Sophia herself teaches—not indeed of Valentinus, but of Solomon. Then infants offered the testimony of Christ [with blood. What of the voice of the boys crying out the cross? They were neither boys nor infants, that is, they were not simple.] The apostle also commanding us to become like children according to the Lord, so that we may be infants in malice and thus at last be wise in our senses through simplicity, once gave the order of wisdom to flow from simplicity. In short: the dove is accustomed to show Christ, but the serpent to tempt; the former is from the beginning the herald of divine peace, the latter from the beginning the plunderer of the divine image. Thus, simplicity alone will be able both to recognize and to show God more easily than prudence alone [which rather shakes and betrays].