Chapter I.—Preface. Reason for a New Work. Pontus Lends Its Rough Character to the Heretic Marcion, a Native. His Heresy Characterized in a Brief Invective.

Whatever in times past1    Retro. we have wrought in opposition to Marcion, is from the present moment no longer to be accounted of.2    Jam hinc viderit. It is a new work which we are undertaking in lieu of the old one.3    Ex vetere. My original tract, as too hurriedly composed, I had subsequently superseded by a fuller treatise. This latter I lost, before it was completely published, by the fraud of a person who was then a brother,4    Fratris. but became afterwards an apostate. He, as it happened, had transcribed a portion of it, full of mistakes, and then published it. The necessity thus arose for an amended work; and the occasion of the new edition induced me to make a considerable addition to the treatise.  This present text,5    Stilus. therefore, of my work—which is the third as superseding6    De. the second, but henceforward to be considered the first instead of the third—renders a preface necessary to this issue of the tract itself that no reader may be perplexed, if he should by chance fall in with the various forms of it which are scattered about.

The Euxine Sea, as it is called, is self-contradictory in its nature, and deceptive in its name.7    [Euxine=hospitable. One recalls Shakespeare:   —“Like to the Pontick Sea   Whose icy current and compulsive force   Ne’er feels retiring ebb.”—Othel.] As you would not account it hospitable from its situation, so is it severed from our more civilised waters by a certain stigma which attaches to its barbarous character. The fiercest nations inhabit it, if indeed it can be called habitation, when life is passed in waggons. They have no fixed abode; their life has8    Cruda. no germ of civilization; they indulge their libidinous desires without restraint, and for the most part naked.  Moreover, when they gratify secret lust, they hang up their quivers on their car-yokes,9    De jugo. See Strabo (Bohn’s trans.), vol. ii. p. 247. to warn off the curious and rash observer.  Thus without a blush do they prostitute their weapons of war. The dead bodies of their parents they cut up with their sheep, and devour at their feasts.  They who have not died so as to become food for others, are thought to have died an accursed death. Their women are not by their sex softened to modesty.  They uncover the breast, from which they suspend their battle-axes, and prefer warfare to marriage. In their climate, too, there is the same rude nature.10    Duritia. The day-time is never clear, the sun never cheerful;11    Libens. the sky is uniformly cloudy; the whole year is wintry; the only wind that blows is the angry North. Waters melt only by fires; their rivers flow not by reason of the ice; their mountains are covered12    Exaggerantur. with heaps of snow. All things are torpid, all stiff with cold. Nothing there has the glow13    Calet. of life, but that ferocity which has given to scenic plays their stories of the sacrifices14    [Iphigenia of Euripides.] of the Taurians, and the loves15    [See the Medea of Euripides.] of the Colchians, and the torments16    [Prometheus of Æschylus.] of the Caucasus. Nothing, however, in Pontus is so barbarous and sad as the fact that Marcion was born there, fouler than any Scythian, more roving than the waggon-life17    Hamaxobio. This Sarmatian clan received its name ῾Αμαξόβιοι from its gypsy kind of life. of the Sarmatian, more inhuman than the Massagete, more audacious than an Amazon, darker than the cloud,18    [I fancy there is point in this singular, the sky of Pontus being always overcast. Cowper says:   “There is but one cloud in the sky,   But that doth the welkin invest,” etc. (of Pontus) colder than its winter, more brittle than its ice, more deceitful than the Ister, more craggy than Caucasus.  Nay19    Quidni. more, the true Prometheus, Almighty God, is mangled20    Lancinatur. by Marcion’s blasphemies. Marcion is more savage than even the beasts of that barbarous region. For what beaver was ever a greater emasculator21    Castrator carnis. See Pliny, N. H. viii. 47 (Bohn’s trans. vol. ii. p. 297). than he who has abolished the nuptial bond?  What Pontic mouse ever had such gnawing powers as he who has gnawed the Gospels to pieces? Verily, O Euxine, thou hast produced a monster more credible to philosophers than to Christians. For the cynic Diogenes used to go about, lantern in hand, at mid-day to find a man; whereas Marcion has quenched the light of his faith, and so lost the God whom he had found. His disciples will not deny that his first faith he held along with ourselves; a letter of his own22    Ipsius litteris. proves this; so that for the future23    Jam. a heretic may from his case24    Hinc. be designated as one who, forsaking that which was prior, afterwards chose out for himself that which was not in times past.25    Retro. For in as far as what was delivered in times past and from the beginning will be held as truth, in so far will that be accounted heresy which is brought in later.  But another brief treatise26    He alludes to his book De Præscriptione Hæreticorum. [Was this work then already written? Dr. Allix thinks not. But see Kaye, p. 47.] will maintain this position against heretics, who ought to be refuted even without a consideration of their doctrines, on the ground that they are heretical by reason of the novelty of their opinions. Now, so far as any controversy is to be admitted, I will for the time27    Interdum. [Can it be that when all this was written (speaking of ourselves) our author had fully lapsed from Communion with the Catholic Church?] (lest our compendious principle of novelty, being called in on all occasions to our aid, should be imputed to want of confidence) begin with setting forth our adversary’s rule of belief, that it may escape no one what our main contention is to be.

CAPUT PRIMUM.

Si quid retro gestum est nobis adversus Marcionem, jam hinc viderit . Novam rem adgredimur ex vetere. Primum opusculum quasi properatum pleniore postea compositione rescideram. Hanc quoque nondum exemplariis suffectam, fraude tunc fratris, dehinc apostatae, amisi; qui forte descripserat quaedam mendosissime, et exhibuit frequentiae. Emendationis necessitas facta est. Innovationis ejus occasio aliquid adjicere persuasit. Ita stylus iste nunc de secundo tertius, et de tertio jam hinc primus, hunc opusculi sui exitum necessario praefatur, ne quem varietas ejus in disperso reperta confundat. 0246C Pontus qui dicitur Euxinus , natura negatur, nomine illuditur. Caeterum, hospitalem Pontum nec de situ aestimes: ita ab humanioribus fretis nostris, quasi quodam barbariae suae pudore secessit. Gentes ferocissimae inhabitant , si tamen habitatur in plaustro. Sedes incerta, vita cruda, libido promiscua 0247A et plurimum nuda, etiam cum abscondunt, suspensis de jugo pharetris indicibus, ne temere quis intercedat, Ita nec armis suis erubescunt. Parentum cadavera, cum pecudibus caesa, convivio convorant. Qui non ita decesserint, ut escatiles fuerint, maledicta mors est. Nec foeminae sexu mitigantur secundum pudorem: ubera excludunt, pensum securibus faciunt; malunt militare, quam nubere. Duritia de coelo quoque. Dies numquam patens: sol numquam libens , unus aer, nebula; totus annus, hibernum; omne quod flaverit, Aquilo est, liquores ignibus redeunt, amnes glacie negantur, montes pruina exaggerantur. Omnia torpent, omnia rigent: nihil illic nisi feritas calet, illa scilicet quae fabulas scenis dedit, de sacrificiis Taurorum, et amoribus 0247B Colchorum, et crucibus Caucasorum. Sed nihil tam barbarum ac triste apud Pontum, quam quod illic Marcion natus est, Scytha tetrior, Hamaxobio instabilior, Massageta inhumanior, Amazone audacior; nubilo obscurior, hyeme frigidior, gelu fragilior; Istro fallacior, Caucaso abruptior. Quidni? penes quem verus Prometheus Deus omnipotens blasphemiis lancinatur . Jam et bestiis illius barbariae importunior Marcion. Quis enim tam castrator carnis castor, quam qui nuptias abstulit? quis tam comesor mus ponticus, quam qui Evangelia corrosit? Nae tu, Euxine, probabiliorem feram philosophis edidisti, quam Christianis. Nam illa canicula Diogenes hominem invenire cupiebat, lucernam meridie circumferens: Marcion Deum quem invenerat, extincto 0247C lumine fidei suae amisit. Non negabunt discipuli ejus primam illius fidem nobiscum fuisse, ipsius literis 0248A testibus: ut hinc jam destinari possit haereticus, qui, deserto quod prius fuerat, id postea sibi elegerit quod retro non erat. In tantum enim haeresis deputabitur quod postea inducitur, in quantum veritas habebitur quod retro et a primordio traditum est. Sed alius libellus hunc gradum sustinebit adversus haereticos, etiam sine retractatu doctrinarum revincendos, quod hoc sint de praescriptione novitatis. Nunc quatenus admittenda congressio est, interdum, ne compendium praescriptionis, ubique advocatum, diffidentiae deputetur. Regulam adversarii prius praetexam, ne cui lateat in qua principalis quaestio dimicatura est.