Against Praxeas 1

In various ways the devil has rivaled the truth. Sometimes he has tried to shake it by defending it. He champions one only God, the almighty maker of the world, so as to make a heresy even out of the oneness. He says that the Father himself came down into the virgin, was himself born of her, himself suffered; in short, that he himself is Jesus Christ. The serpent forgot himself: for when he tempted Jesus Christ after John's baptism, he approached him as the Son of God, sure that God had a Son, even from the very Scriptures out of which he was then building his temptation: “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread”; and again, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here; for it is written that he has given his angels charge over you” (he, that is, the Father) “that they may lift you up in their hands, lest you strike your foot against a stone.” Or will he reproach the Gospels with a lie, saying: “Let Matthew and Luke see to it; but I approached God himself, I tempted the Almighty himself face to face; that is why I approached, that is why I tempted. But if he had been the Son of God, I would never have deigned to tempt him”? But he himself is rather a liar from the beginning, and so is any man he has suborned of his own, like Praxeas. For this man was the first to bring this kind of perversity from Asia to Roman soil, a restless man in other ways too, and puffed up besides with boasting of martyrdom on account of a mere, simple, short spell of tedium in prison; when, even if he had handed over his body to be burned, he would have gained nothing, not having the love of God, whose spiritual gifts he also fought against. For when the bishop of Rome was already acknowledging the prophecies of Montanus, Prisca, and Maximilla, and on the strength of that acknowledgment was bestowing peace on the churches of Asia and Phrygia, this same man, by asserting falsehoods about these prophets and their churches and by defending the authority of his predecessors, forced him both to recall the letters of peace already sent out and to desist from his purpose of receiving the spiritual gifts. So Praxeas did two pieces of the devil's business at Rome: he drove out prophecy and brought in heresy; he put the Paraclete to flight and crucified the Father. Praxeas' tares had sprouted here too, sown over the good seed while many slept in the simplicity of their doctrine; then, exposed through the one God chose, they even seemed to have been pulled up. In fact the teacher had given a written guarantee of his amendment, and the document remains with the psychics, among whom the matter was then transacted. From then on, silence. And we, indeed, were afterwards separated from the psychics by our acknowledgment and defense of the Paraclete. But those tares had then shaken out their seed everywhere. For some time it lay hidden, with a cunning vitality, through hypocrisy, and now it has broken out afresh. But it will be rooted out afresh too, if the Lord wills, in this season of respite; if not, on its own day all the adulterous crops will be gathered and burned with the other stumbling blocks in unquenchable fire.