Sacred Texts  Christianity  Early Church Fathers  Index  Previous  Next 





4. Then, again, collecting a set of expressions and names scattered here and there [in Scripture], they twist them, as we have already said, from a natural to a non-natural sense. In so doing, they act like those who bring forward any kind of hypothesis they fancy, and then endeavour to support 2781 them out of the poems of Homer, so that the ignorant imagine that Homer actually composed the verses bearing upon that hypothesis, which has, in fact, been but newly constructed; and many others are led so far by the regularly-formed sequence of the verses, as to doubt whether Homer may not have composed them. Of this kind 2782 is the following passage, where one, describing Hercules as having been sent by Eurystheus to the dog in the infernal regions, does so by means of these Homeric verses,—for there can be no objection to our citing these by way of illustration, since the same sort of attempt appears in both:—

“Thus saying, there sent forth from his house deeply groaning.”—Od., x. 76. “The hero Hercules conversant with mighty deeds.”—Od., xxi. 26. “Eurystheus, the son of Sthenelus, descended from Perseus.”—Il., xix. 123. “That he might bring from Erebus the dog of gloomy Pluto.”—Il., viii. 368. “And he advanced like a mountain-bred lion confident of strength.”—Od., vi. 130. “Rapidly through the city, while all his friends followed.” —Il., xxiv. 327. “Both maidens, and youths, and much-enduring old men.”—Od., xi. 38. “Mourning for him bitterly as one going forward to death.” —Il., xxiv. 328. “But Mercury and the blue-eyed Minerva conducted him.”—Od., xi. 626. “For she knew the mind of her brother, how it laboured with grief.”—Il., ii. 409.


5. But since what may prove a finishing-stroke 2784 to this exhibition is wanting, so that any one, on following out their farce to the end, may then at once append an argument which shall overthrow it, we have judged it well to point out, first of all, in what respects the very fathers of this fable differ among themselves, as if they were inspired by different spirits of error. For this very fact forms an a priori proof that the truth proclaimed by the Church is immoveable, 2785 and that the theories of these men are but a tissue of falsehoods.



It is difficult to give an exact rendering of μελετᾶν in this passage; the old Lat. version translates it by meditari, which Massuet proposes to render “skilfully to fit.”


Tertullian refers (Præscrip. Hær.) to those Homeric centos of which a specimen follows. We have given each line as it stands in the original: the text followed by Irenæus differs slightly from the received text.


Literally, “immoveable in himself,” the word ἀκλινῆ being used with an apparent reference to the original meaning of κανόνα, a builder’s rule.


The meaning of the word ἀπολύτρωσις here is not easily determined; but it is probably a scenic term equivalent to ἀπόλυσις, and may be rendered as above.


[The Creed, in the sublime simplicity of its fundamental articles, is established; that is, by the impossibility of framing anything to take their place.]

Next: Chapter X.—Unity of the faith of the...