Irenaeus of Lyons · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Chapter XXXI. How the things already said suffice to overturn all the heretics. Now that those who follow Valentinus have been demolished, the entire crowd of heretics has been overthrown along with them. For what and how much we have said against the Pleroma and against what lies outside it, showing that the Father of the universe will be enclosed and circumscribed by whatever is outside him (if indeed anything is outside him), and that there would need to be many Fathers and many Pleromas and many fabrications of worlds, some begun by one set of beings and failing off into others, in every direction; and that all these, persevering each in its own, ought not to meddle curiously with the affairs of others, in which they have neither part nor fellowship; and that there is no other God at all, but that the title 'Almighty' belongs to one alone — all this applies equally against those who follow Marcion, and Simon, and Menander, or whoever else likewise separates the created order that belongs to us from the Father. And again, what we have said against those who claim that the Father of the universe indeed comprehends all things, but that the created order that belongs to us was not made by him but by some other power, or by angels ignorant of the Forefather, enclosed like a point within the immense magnitude of the universe, like a stain on a cloak — showing that it is not credible that anyone other than the Father of the universe made the created order that belongs to us — this likewise tells equally against the followers of Saturninus, Basilides, and Carpocrates, along with the remaining Gnostic sects, who assert matters of the same kind in comparable terms. And what has been said about the emissions, and the Aeons, and the diminishment, and how their unstable mother behaved, likewise overturns Basilides and all who are falsely called 'the knowing ones,' even though they use different names for the same ideas — indeed it applies to them even more, since they transfer things that lie outside the truth into the shape of their own doctrine. And whatever we have said about numbers applies, and will be said to apply, against all who twist the appearance of truth into that kind of thing. And whatever has been said about the Demiurge, demonstrating him alone to be God, the universe's Father, and whatever will still be said in what follows, I say against all the heretics: the milder and more humane among them you will turn away and confound, so that they no longer blaspheme their own founder and maker and nourisher and Lord, nor invent for his origin some tale of defect and ignorance; but the fierce and horrible and irrational ones you will drive far from yourself, so that you no longer have to put up with their wordiness.
Beyond this, those who follow Simon, and Carpocrates, and any others who are said to work wonders, will be convicted: not working in the power of God, nor in truth, nor doing what they do as benefits to men, but for ruin and error, through magical delusions and every kind of fraud, doing more harm than good to those who believe in them, in that they lead them astray. For they cannot give sight to the blind, nor hearing to the deaf, nor drive out all demons — only those which they themselves have sent in, if indeed they even do that much; nor are they able to heal a person who is feeble, or one who limps, or one whose limbs are crippled, or anyone suffering in some different part of the body, as often happens through ordinary bodily infirmity; nor can they restore good health to those whose ailments come from outside causes — except through their sorceries. So far are they from raising the dead, as the Lord raised the dead, and as the apostles have done through prayer — and often within the brotherhood, when it was necessary, the whole church of a given place asking through fasting and much supplication, the departed one's spirit has come back and the man stands restored, given as a gift in answer to the entreaties made by God's holy people — something these people will not even grant is possible in the first place: that there is a resurrection from the dead is, in their view, simply a way of speaking of the 'knowledge' they talk about. Magical illusion is worked, impiously, before the gaze of men; but in the Church compassion, and mercy, and steadfastness, and truth are brought to the aid of men, not only without payment and freely, but with us even giving up what is our own for the salvation of others — and those who receive this are utterly foreign to arrogance and greed, and to any spiritual virtue; but full in every respect of every kind of fraud, and of apostate inspiration, and of demonic working, and of idolatrous phantasm — for they are the forerunners of that dragon who, through just such phantasms, will make the third part of the stars fall away in his tail and cast them down to earth. These people, like him, must be shunned; and the greater the phantasm they are said to work, the more one must watch them, as having received all the more a spirit of wickedness. If anyone observes the daily conduct and activity of these prophets of theirs, he will find it one and the same as that of demons.