Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Would that no heresies had ever needed to exist, so that men of proven worth might simply shine forth on their own! Then we would have no business at all with the philosophers over the soul either — those patriarchs, so to speak, of the heretics — seeing that already back then the apostle foresaw philosophy as a threat to truth. For having sampled that chattering city, Athens, and tasted every huckster of wisdom and eloquence to be found there, he came away and framed that warning decree of his. [2] And indeed the theory of the soul has likewise been shaken by these philosophized doctrines of men who water down the wine: some deny the soul is immortal, some claim it is more than immortal; some dispute over its substance, others over its form, others over its every last disposition; some trace its origin from one source, others lead its departure off toward another, exactly as the prestige of Plato, or the vigor of Zeno, or the steady drone of Aristotle, or the torpor of Epicurus, or the gloom of Heraclitus, or the frenzy of Empedocles happened to persuade them. [3] Divine teaching went wrong, I suppose, in rising from Judea rather than from Greece! And Christ, too, made his mistake in sending out fishermen to preach rather than some sophist. So if things of this sort, smoking up out of philosophy's kitchen, cloud over the clear, clean air of truth, then Christians must clear that fog away, striking at the arguments from their very roots — that is, the philosophical ones — and setting against them the definitions that come from heaven, that is, the Lord's own, so that both the snares by which pagans are caught up in philosophy may be destroyed, and the ones by which the faithful are shaken loose by heresy may be blunted. [4] One engagement has already been settled against Hermogenes, as I said before, since we claim the soul from the breath of God, not from matter — and there too we stood fortified by the unclouded rule of God's own determination: "and God breathed the breath of life into the face of man, and man became a living soul" — from the breath of God, unmistakably. On that score there is nothing more to turn over; it has its own heading and its own heretic already dealt with. From here I will open my case against the rest.