Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
AGAINST THE OPINION OF SIMON THE HERETIC. [1] No such madness has yet, down to our own day, broken out under any heretical name as would reshape human souls into beasts — but we have had to bring in this case too and rule it out, as belonging with those already examined, so that Homer might be knocked down out of his peacock just as Euphorbus was knocked out of Pythagoras, and so that this same transmigration or transembodiment, once beaten back again, might strike down the doctrine that has furnished heretics with some of their material. [2] For Simon the Samaritan, in the Acts of the Apostles the would-be buyer of the Holy Spirit, after being condemned by the apostle himself and weeping in vain over his money as it perished with him, turned to attacking the truth — as though for the comfort of revenge — and, backed by the powers of his own art, in a kind of magical stunt bought back, with that same money, a certain Helen of Tyre out of a house of public prostitution: a fitting price for the Holy Spirit! [3] He makes himself out to be the Supreme Father, and her his first Emanation — the very impulse by which he had first conceived of making angels and archangels; that she, in possession of this design, leapt forth from the Father and plunged down into the lower regions, and there, forestalling the Father's own design, brought forth the angelic powers, ignorant of the Father, the makers of this world; that these, in turn, did not hold on to her — lest, once she had departed, her offspring should be seen as another's — and so subjected her to every indignity, so that, degraded, she might never be free to leave, and finally cast her down even into human shape, shut up there as though bound within the fetters of the flesh; [4] and that thus, tossed for many ages through one female body after another, she was in fact that same Helen who proved so ruinous to Priam, and later to the eyes of Stesichorus, whom she struck blind for his slanderous verse, and then restored to sight for his poem of amends; that migrating so from body to body, she at last, in the ultimate disgrace, stood on display under the very name "Helen," a cheaper Helen still. This, then, is the lost sheep, to whom the Supreme Father — Simon, that is — came down, and having first recovered her and carried her back up, on his shoulders or, I don't know, on his thighs, then turned his attention to the salvation of mankind, as though by way of ransoming men from those same angelic powers — to deceive whom he too took on their shape, and, passing himself off as a man among men, appeared in Judea as the Son, but in Samaria as the Father. [5] O Helen, put through her paces by poets and heretics alike — infamous now for adultery, now for prostitution, except that she is dug up out of Troy more gloriously than out of a brothel: a thousand ships were launched for the Troy version, but perhaps not a thousand pence for the brothel one. Blush, Simon, slower to search for her, less steady in bringing her back. Menelaus, by contrast, pursues his lost wife at once, at once demands the return of the stolen one, and wrests her back in a ten years' war — no hiding, no deceiving, no quibbling. I am afraid that he was the truer "father," who labored more watchfully, more boldly, and longer over the recovery of his Helen.