Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
These are 'the doctrines of men and of demons,' born to tickle itching ears out of the cleverness of worldly wisdom, which the Lord, calling it folly, chose the world's foolish things to confound — confounding philosophy itself along with it. For that is the very stuff of worldly wisdom: the reckless interpreter of the divine nature and its arrangement. Indeed the heresies themselves are got up by philosophy. From it come the aeons, and I know not what infinite 'forms,' and Valentinus's trinity of man — the man had been a Platonist. From it comes Marcion's god, made better by his tranquillity — that came from the Stoics. And when it is said that the soul perishes, Epicurus is the model followed; and when the restoration of the flesh is denied, that is taken from the common school of all the philosophers; and where matter is set on a level with God, that is Zeno's doctrine; and wherever anything is alleged about a fiery god, Heraclitus steps in. The same material gets turned over between heretics and philosophers, the same questions keep getting tangled up in it: whence evil, and why? whence man, and how? and — the one Valentinus lately proposed — whence God? namely, from Enthymesis and Ectroma. Poor Aristotle! who taught them dialectic, that art of building up and tearing down, that shape-shifter of opinions, forced in its conjectures, harsh in its arguments, a factory of quarrels, a nuisance even to itself, forever taking everything back so as never quite to have settled anything. Hence those endless fables and genealogies, those barren questions, those words that creep like a cancer — against which the apostle, reining us in, expressly warns that philosophy [and empty seduction] must be guarded against, writing to the Colossians: 'See that no one deceives you through philosophy and empty seduction, according to the tradition of men, contrary to the providence of the Holy Spirit.' He had been at Athens, and there, from his encounters, had come to know that human wisdom which apes and corrupts the truth, itself, moreover, split into a hundred heresies by the sheer variety of its warring sects. What, then, does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? What has the Academy to do with the Church? What have heretics to do with Christians? Our own school is the Porch of Solomon, who himself had taught that the Lord is to be sought in simplicity of heart. Let those see to it who have produced a Stoic, a Platonic, or a dialectical Christianity. We, after Jesus Christ, have no need of curiosity; after the gospel, no need of inquiry. Once we believe, we desire to believe nothing further. For this we believe first of all: that there is nothing further we ought to believe.