Miscellanies 3.2.5–3.3.24

Those who derive from Carpocrates and Epiphanes think that wives should be held in common; from them the greatest blasphemy against the Name has flowed. This Epiphanes, whose writings are still in circulation, was the son of Carpocrates and of a mother named Alexandria; on his father's side he was an Alexandrian, on his mother's side from Cephallenia. He lived seventeen years in all, and he is honored as a god at Same in Cephallenia, where a temple of rough stones, altars, precincts, and a museum have been built and consecrated to him; and the Cephallenians, gathering at the temple at each new moon, sacrifice to Epiphanes on his birthday as a god, pour libations, feast, and sing hymns. He was educated by his father in general learning and in Plato, and he founded the knowledge of the Monad, from which the heresy of the Carpocratians also comes.

He says, then, in his work On Justice, that the justice of God is a kind of fellowship with equality. “The heaven, stretched out equally on every side, surrounds the whole earth in a circle, and the night shows all the stars equally; and God poured out from above the sun, the cause of the day and father of light, equally on the earth for all who are able to see, and they all see in common, since he does not distinguish rich or poor, people or ruler, fools and the wise, females, males, free, slaves. Nor does he do anything different for the irrational animals, but, pouring it out from above equally for all living things, he establishes justice for good and bad alike, since no one can have more or take from his neighbor, so as to double the light and have his neighbor's too. The sun makes common food spring up for all living things, justice in common being given to all equally; and for such purposes the race of oxen is born alike as the oxen, of pigs as the pigs, of sheep as the sheep, and so all the rest; for in them community appears as justice. Then all things are sown alike according to kind by community; and common food is released on the ground for all the cattle that graze, and for all equally, ruled by no law, justice being present to all harmoniously by the provision of the one who gives and commands.

Nor do the matters of generation have a written law (for it would have been rewritten); they sow and beget equally, having a fellowship implanted by justice. The Maker and Father of all, legislating by his own justice, gave the eye for seeing to all in common and equally, not distinguishing female from male, rational from irrational, nor, in short, anything from anything, but, distributing sight by equality and community, he has granted it alike to all by one command. But the laws,” he says, “being unable to punish men's ignorance, taught them to transgress. For the particularity of the laws cut up and gnaws away the fellowship of the divine law”; not understanding the apostle's saying, “Through the law I knew sin.” And he says that “mine” and “yours” came in through the laws, so that people no longer enjoy … in common either land or possessions, nor indeed marriage. “For he made the vines for all in common, which refuse neither sparrow nor thief, and the grain likewise, and the other fruits. But fellowship, once transgressed, and the rules of equality, begot the thief of flocks and fruits.

God, then, having made all things in common for man, and having brought the female together with the male in common and joined all living things alike, declared justice to be fellowship with equality. But those who were born in this way denied the fellowship that brought about their birth, and say, ‘Let the one who has married one woman keep her,’ though all could share, as the rest of the living things show.” Having said this word for word, he adds again in the very same words: “For he implanted in males a vigorous and more violent desire for the continuance of the races, which neither law nor custom nor anything else can abolish. For it is God's decree.” And how could this man still be considered in our discussion, when he plainly destroys both the law and the gospel by these words? For the one says, “You shall not commit adultery”; the other says, “Everyone who looks with desire has already committed adultery.” For “You shall not covet,” said by the law, shows the one God proclaimed through the law, the prophets, and the gospel; for it says, “You shall not covet your neighbor's wife.” And the neighbor is not the Jew to the Jew, for he is a brother and of the same spirit; it remains, then, that “neighbor” means the foreigner. For how is one who is able to share in the Spirit not a neighbor? For Abraham is the father not only of Hebrews but also of Gentiles.

And if the adulteress and the man who committed sexual immorality with her are punished with death, it is clear that the commandment that says, “You shall not covet your neighbor's wife,” speaks about the Gentiles, so that one who, according to the law, abstains from his neighbor's wife and from his sister may hear plainly from the Lord: “But I say, you shall not desire.” The addition of the word “I” shows the more intense force of the commandment, and that Carpocrates and Epiphanes fight against God. In that much-talked-of book, I mean On Justice, Epiphanes adds, word for word: “Hence the saying ‘You shall not covet’ must be heard as spoken ridiculously by the lawgiver, and still more ridiculous is his saying ‘your neighbor's goods.’ For the very one who gave desire, as holding together what belongs to generation, commands it to be taken away, though he took it from no living thing. And ‘your neighbor's wife,’ which forces fellowship into private ownership, he said even more ridiculously.”

These are the teachings of the noble Carpocratians. They say that these and certain others, emulators of similar evils, gathering for their dinners (for I would not call their meeting an agape), men and women together, after they have eaten their fill (“in satiety is Aphrodite,” as they say), overturn the lamp and so put out the light that would shame this harlots' justice of theirs, and then have intercourse as they wish with whom they wish; and having practiced fellowship in such an agape, by day they demand from whatever women they wish obedience to the law of Carpocrates, for it is not lawful to call it divine. Such laws, I think, Carpocrates should have laid down for the lusts of dogs, pigs, and goats. He seems to me also to have misunderstood Plato, who says in the Republic that the wives of all should be common: common before marriage, for those who are going to ask for them, as the theater is common to the spectators, he says, but each belonging to the one who first takes her, and the married woman no longer common.

And Xanthus, in the work entitled Magica, says: “The Magi … consider it lawful to have intercourse with mothers, daughters, and sisters, and hold wives in common, not by force and in secret, but with both consenting, when one wishes to marry the other's wife.” It is of these, I think, and of similar heresies that Jude spoke prophetically in his letter: “Likewise these too, dreaming” (for they do not lay hold of the truth awake), as far as “and their mouth speaks arrogant things.”

Now if Plato himself and the Pythagoreans, as later also the followers of Marcion, supposed birth to be evil (and Plato was far from proposing that wives be common), yet the Marcionites consider nature evil, made from evil matter and by a just Demiurge. For this reason, not wishing to fill up the world made by the Demiurge, they wish to abstain from marriage, opposing their own Maker and hastening to the Good One who called them, not to the one who, as they say, is God in another way. Hence, wishing to leave nothing of their own here, they become self-controlled not by choice, but through hatred of the one who made them, not wishing to use the things he created. But these, departing from natural reasoning in their impious fight against God, despising the patience and kindness of God, even if they do not wish to marry, still use the created foods and breathe the Creator's air, being his works and remaining among his things; and they preach, as they say, a foreign knowledge, though for this very reason they ought to be grateful to the Lord of the world, that here they received the gospel.

But we will argue against these most precisely when we treat of first principles. The philosophers we have mentioned, from whom the Marcionites impiously learned that birth is evil and then vaunt it as their own doctrine, do not hold that it is evil by nature, but evil for the soul that has seen through to the truth. For they bring the soul, which is divine, down here into the world as into a place of punishment; and according to them the souls embodied must be purified. And this doctrine belongs no longer to the Marcionites but to those who hold that souls are embodied, change bodies, and are poured from one vessel into another; against them there will be another occasion to speak, when we treat of the soul.

Heraclitus, at any rate, clearly speaks ill of birth when he says: “Once born, they wish to live and to have their fates, or rather to rest; and they leave children behind to become fates.” And Empedocles clearly agrees with him, saying: “I wept and wailed when I saw the unfamiliar place.” And further: “For from living things he made dead ones, changing their forms.” And again: “Alas, wretched race of mortals, sorely unblessed, from what strifes and groanings you were born!” And the Sibyl says: “Mortal men and fleshly, being nothing,” as the poet writes likewise: “Earth nourishes nothing feebler than man.”

Indeed, Theognis too shows birth to be evil, speaking thus: “Best of all for those on earth is never to be born, nor to see the rays of the piercing sun; but, once born, to pass as quickly as possible through the gates of Hades.” And in agreement with them the tragic poet Euripides writes: “For we ought to gather and lament the one who is born, for the evils into which he comes; but the one who has died and ceased from toils we should send from the house with joy and blessings.” And again he will say similar things thus: “Who knows if living is dying, and dying living?”

Herodotus seems to do the same, making Solon say: “O Croesus, every man is a misfortune.” And his story about Cleobis and Biton clearly means nothing else than to censure birth and praise death. “As is the generation of leaves, so is that of men,” says Homer. And Plato in the Cratylus attributes to Orpheus the account of the soul being punished in the body, and says this: “For some say that the body is the tomb (sēma) of the soul, as though it were buried in the present life; and because by it the soul signifies whatever it signifies, it is also rightly called a sign (sēma) for this reason. But the followers of Orpheus seem most of all to have given this name, as though the soul were paying the penalty for whatever it pays it.”

It is worth recalling also the words of Philolaus; for the Pythagorean says this: “The ancient theologians and seers also bear witness that the soul has been yoked to the body as a punishment, and is buried in it as in a tomb.” And Pindar too, speaking of the mysteries at Eleusis, adds: “Blessed is he who, having seen those things, goes beneath the earth: he knows the end of life, and he knows its Zeus-given beginning.” And Plato, in agreement, does not hesitate to write thus in the Phaedo: “And those who established the initiations for us,” as far as “will dwell with the gods.” And what of when he says: “As long as we have the body, and our soul is mixed up with such an evil, we will never sufficiently gain what we desire”? Does he not hint that birth is the cause of the greatest evils? And in the Phaedo he further testifies: “For those who happen to touch philosophy rightly are likely to have escaped the notice of others, that they themselves practice nothing but dying and being dead.”

And again: “So here too the philosopher's soul most dishonors the body and flees from it, and seeks to be by itself.” And does this not agree with the divine apostle when he says, “Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from the body of this death?” unless he means figuratively by “body of death” the agreement of those who have been swept into vice. And Plato, even before Marcion, seems to turn away from sexual intercourse, which is the beginning of birth, in the first book of the Republic. For, praising old age, he adds: “Know well that for me, as much as the other pleasures of the body wither, so much do the desires and pleasures of discussion increase.” And recalling the use of sexual pleasures: “Hush, man! I have most gladly escaped it, as if I had escaped a raging and savage master.”

Again, in the Phaedo, speaking ill of birth, he writes: “The account given about them in secret teachings, that we men are in a kind of prison.” And again: “Those who are judged to have been outstanding in living holily are the ones who are freed and released from these places in the earth as from prisons, and arrive above at the pure dwelling.” But nevertheless, holding this view, he perceives that the government of the world is good, and says: “One must not release oneself from it or run away.” And, to put it briefly, he gave Marcion no starting point for considering matter evil, since he himself spoke piously of the world thus: “From the one who put it together it has acquired all good things; but from its former state it has whatever is harsh and unjust in the heaven, and it has these from that and produces them in living things.”

And he adds still more clearly: “The cause of these things for it is the bodily element of its mixture, native to its ancient nature, because it shared in much disorder before coming into the present world.” No less in the Laws does he lament the human race, speaking thus: “But the gods, pitying the race of men, born to toil, appointed for them as rests from their toils the alternation of festivals.” And in the Epinomis he goes through the causes of the pity, and says this: “How from the beginning birth is hard for every living thing: first sharing in the state of those carried in the womb, then being born, and further being nourished and educated, all of which come about through countless toils, as we all say.”

What then? Does not Heraclitus too call birth death, like Pythagoras and like Socrates in the Gorgias, when he says: “Death is all that we see awake, and all that we see asleep is sleep”? But enough of these. When we treat of first principles, we will then examine these contradictions too, which the philosophers hint at and the Marcionites teach. Yet I think we have shown, not unclearly, that Marcion took the starting points of his strange doctrines from Plato, ungratefully and ignorantly.

Let our discussion of self-control go on. We were saying that the Greeks, seeing the troubles, said many things against the begetting of children, and that the Marcionites, taking these godlessly, are ungrateful to the Creator. For the tragedy says: “Not to be born is better for mortals than to be born. Then I bear children with bitter pains; and having borne them, if I bear fools, I groan in vain, seeing them bad, while losing the good; and if they are saved, I melt my wretched heart with dread. What good is this? Is it not enough for one soul to be distraught and have toils for it?” And again likewise: “To me it seems, now and long ago, that men should never beget children, seeing into how many toils we beget them.” And in what is said further he clearly traces the cause of evils back to the beginnings, saying thus: “You who were born to misfortune and to fare ill, you became a man and received the misfortune of life from the time when this ether began to nourish all, giving breath to mortals. Do not, then, being mortal, take mortal things amiss.”

Again he renders similar things thus: “No mortal is blessed or happy; for no one yet was born free from grief.” And then again: “Alas, alas, how many are the chances of mortal woes, how many their forms! No one could tell their end.” And likewise: “For of those among mortals there is none that is happy to the end.”

For this reason, they say, the Pythagoreans too abstain from sexual intercourse. But to me it seems, on the contrary, that they marry for the sake of begetting children, and after the begetting of children wish to master the pleasure of intercourse. For this reason they mystically forbid the use of beans: not because the pulse causes wind, is hard to digest, and makes dreams disturbed; nor because a bean is likened to a man's head, according to that little verse, “Eating beans is the same as eating your parents' heads”; but rather because beans, when eaten, make women barren. Theophrastus, at any rate, in the fifth book of his Causes of Plants, relates that bean husks placed around the roots of newly planted trees dry up the shoots; and domestic hens that feed on them continually become barren.