5. Look, Sabellius, and ponder, open the eyes of your heart, and be not blind; let your thought and those who have been deceived by you descend with Saint John to the Jordan. Open thy ears and listen to the voice of the prophet, saying: I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness (Matt. 3:3). Listen to the Forerunner of the Lord, who was vouchsafed to receive the name of an angel, who received the Holy Spirit from his mother's womb and leaped up at Mary's entrance to Elizabeth. While he was still in his womb, he knew the coming of his Lord and leaped up. It was given to him to open the preaching and prepare the way of the Lord. Believe him, and you will not deviate from the goal of truth. As soon as he recognized his Lord, he testified, saying: "I have need of You, and Thou art coming to me." When the Saviour said: "Leave it now, that all righteousness may be fulfilled" (Matt. 3:15), and was baptized by him, then, as the Divine Gospel says, John testifies, saying, "The heavens were opened, and saw the Holy Spirit descending in the form of a dove, and coming upon Him, and a voice from heaven: This is My beloved Son, in Whom I am well pleased" (John 1:32; Matt. 3:16-17). O contentious husband! The father was in heaven, a voice came down from heaven. If the voice was from heaven, then I beseech you, consider your wrong opinion. To whom did the Father say: "This is my beloved Son, in Whom I am well pleased"? And who was this? Why did the Spirit descend in the form of a dove, although the Holy Spirit does not have a body? For the Only-begotten One alone clothed Himself in a body and was truly incarnate from the Ever-Virgin Mary through the Holy Spirit. Not from the seed of men, but from Mary, He, the founding Word, formed Himself a body, as well as a human soul and mind, and to this day He remains a man, having taken everything into Himself completely and united with His Divinity, not so that He only dwelt in man (let this not be), but the Holy God Himself, the Word, became man.

6. Why does the Spirit appear in the form of a dove? In order to impress upon you, who wish to appear wise, but understand nothing rightly, that you should not utter blasphemy and think not to merge the Spirit with the Father or the Son. The Holy Spirit, having no body, takes the form of a dove in order to expose your error and show that the Spirit in itself has a personal existence; the Father has it, the Only-begotten has it, yet the Godhead is not divided, and His glory is not diminished. You see how the Trinity is numbered: the Father gives a voice from heaven, the Son is baptized in the Jordan, the Holy Spirit descends in the form of a dove. Tell me again who has spoken this: Behold, my beloved servant shall understand, and in Him my soul shall be well pleased, and my Spirit shall lay down my Spirit, and shall proclaim judgment with the tongue. He will not speak, he will not cry out, his voice will be heard at the crossroads. He will not break broken reeds, nor quench the flax that is heard, until he will bring judgment to victory, etc. (Matt. 12:18-20; Isaiah 52:13; 42:1-3)? My husband is arguing! Can these words not contain an indication of the Trinity? Did the Father say this about Himself in the prophet? And who is this, of whom it is written: "The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand" (Psalm 109:1)? Or else, as the Gospel says, and ascended into heaven, and sat at the right hand of the Father (Mark 16:19), and come to judge the living and the dead? Or again, how did you not be persuaded by the two men who appeared in white clothes and said to the disciples: Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking to heaven? This same Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will he also come (Acts 1:11)? Whom did Blessed Stephen see when he said: "Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing at the right hand of God" (Acts 7:56)? And you, ignorant of everything, who did not understand the voice of the Holy Scriptures, did more harm to yourself and to those who listened to you, falling away from the holy faith in the truth of God.

7. God truly said: I am the first, and I am after this, besides Me there is none else (Isaiah 44:6). It is true that there are not many gods, but there is one God, the first and after this, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, unmerged and indivisible in its unity; The Father truly begat the Son, and the Son is truly begotten of the Father and has a personal existence without beginning and before time, and the Holy Spirit is truly from the Father and the Son, has the same Divinity, proceeds from the Father and always receives from the Son — one God is the first and therefore is the same. This is also said in the person of Christ Himself for the sake of some other economy. Although Jesus Christ our Lord often appeared to the prophets and announced His future coming, some did not accept Him, expecting another in His place, therefore, so that the children of Israel, having gone mad and turned to the side of the superstitious worshippers and idols and those who introduced polytheism into the world, would not worship the idols of the Amorites, Hittites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, Gergashites, Jebusites, Aruckees and Asannaites (Gen. 10:15-16), [As it is said of them, that they worshipped Beelphegor Chemosh, Astarte, Mazuroth, Neasta [224], and Beelzebath [225]] and other pagan idols], the Lord said to them, "I am the first to this one, that he may turn them away from the deception of the fables of the pagans, the worshippers of polytheism. And because they had to deny the coming of His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, He also said to the Jews, I am the first, and after these things, the first, who came in the flesh, and after this is coming to judge the living and the dead, who suffered on the cross, was buried, and rose again, and with the same body ascended into heaven in glory, because the body received a share in the glory of His divinity, shone forth, is no longer subject to touch, and death is no longer partaker of, for Christ, as the Scripture says, is risen from the dead, and death does not possess him, says the Apostle (Romans 6:9). See how the accuracy [of the Scriptures] guides man, so that he does not deviate in any direction from the truth. When reason decided to produce polytheism, then man had to hear: "The Lord thy God, the Lord is one" (Deuteronomy 6:4). When the children of Israel wait for another Christ, and not for the one who came, they will hear: I am the first and after this. I am alpha and omega (Rev. 1:18); the alpha (α) is open downwards, and the omega (ω) is opened upwards — let the speech be fulfilled: He who descended, he is also exalted above all principality, and authority, and dominion, and every name that is called (Ephesians 4:10; 1:21). And so that, reflecting on the words: "I am the first, and I am after these, I am the alpha and the omega, the Lord thy God the Lord is one, I am this" (Exodus 3:14), no one would deny Christ and the Holy Spirit, for this it is said: "My Father is greater than me" (John 14:28); and again: "That they may know Thee the only true God, and Whom Thou hast sent Jesus Christ" (17:3). This is said not in the sense that the Son is not the true God, but in order to raise the name of the Trinity to unity and to turn human thought from polytheism to one Godhead.

8. But if Arius, having gone astray in his mind, thinks that he alone is called the true God, i.e. the Father, and the Son, although he is God, is not true, he again exposes him in a different way, saying: "I am the true light, which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world" (John 8:12; 1:9). Of the Father it is said that God is light (1 John 1:5), and it is not said: "True light," so that from the name of God true and light true we may know the equality of the Godhead in the Father with the Son, and in the Son with the Father; and the Father is called light, and the Son is called God, without the addition of the word "true" here, and there was no need to speak, because there is no doubt, for the words God and light clearly show the one perfection of the same truth of both the Father in relation to the Son and the Son in relation to the Father. Thus all the folly of your delusion has been refuted. For the Father is the Father, the Son is the Son, the Holy Spirit is the Holy Spirit, the Trinity is one Godhead, one glory, one dominion. To Him be glory and dominion, to the Father in the Son, to the Son in the Father with the Holy Spirit forever and ever. Amen.

Having shaken this heresy as it were a Libyan serpent, or a frog, or a grass snake, or some other kind of creeping thing, very terrible, but not having the power to inflict harm by a bite, and trampling it up by the power of the Holy Trinity, let us, going forward in the order of heresies, call upon the very Protector of our poverty and poverty, that He may help us in a worthy manner to expose what is said and what happens in each heresy, and to refute them.

About the first Origenists, — they are shameful. Forty-third, and according to the general order sixty-third heresy

Hl. 1. Some heretics are called Origenists; This kind of heresy is not found everywhere. In my opinion, this heresy also appeared after those heresies. And why they are called Origenists, we do not know quite clearly, whether from Origen the adamantine, who was called Syntakt (the writer), or from someone else, I do not know. However, this name is accepted among us.

Their heresy is recognized as similar to the heresy of Epiphanes, of which I have spoken above, in the exposition of the Gnostic heresies. They accept the various writings of the New and Old Testaments, reject marriage, and know no bounds in voluptuousness. Some said that this heresy was born in Rome and in Africa. They defile their body, mind, and soul with debauchery. Some of them look like monastics, and the women who live with them look like nuns. Their body is emaciated: satisfying their lust, they, I will express myself more modestly, do the work of the son of Judah, whose name is Abnanas (Gen. 38:9). For just as he, when his body touched Tamar and satisfied his lusts, did not do what was proper for procreation, according to the way of child-making given by God, but committed a sin against himself in the very way of evil action: so they also make use of imaginary wives, committing this unlawful deed. For them, the object of competition is not innocence, but hypocritical purity, which bears one name. They take care that a woman does not become pregnant through corruption, or that children do not multiply in the world, or that they are not caught by people; they want to be honored for this feat of chastity, which is revered among them, and yet this is what they do. Others prefer to do this most shameful deed not through the mediation of a woman, but in other ways, defiling themselves with their own hands. And in this they imitate the aforesaid son of Judah, defiling the earth with their transgressions and abominable drops, and with their feet grinding their effluents upon the earth, lest their seed should be taken away by unclean flies, to be conceived and begotten by demons.

Hl. 2. They, as I have already said, make use of various writings of the Old and New Testaments, and some apocryphal books, especially those which are called the Acts of Andrew and others. They have even often boasted that they do this openly, while they accuse those who belong to the Church who have lovers, so called cohabiting wives (τὰς συνεισὰκτους), — they accuse that they also do this secretly, being ashamed of people, so that they associate with iniquity, and outwardly, in order to avoid people's rumors, adorn themselves with an honorable name. Some have told us about some of the dead, and so have they, who have heard it from the raped women themselves. Among these, the name of a certain Bishop, who had held the office of bishop in a small city of Palestine for quite a few years, was exposed, as if he had such women in his service, i.e. cohabiting; and we also know that he was one of the confessors. However, we did not believe those who told this and said that they had heard about it from the women themselves, although the extreme cunning of the people who said this prompted us to believe, and sometimes not to believe the bad rumor about the previously mentioned Elder Bishop, which was spread after his death. And the guilt brought against him was this: when one of them was caught in the act of sin with a woman, and when we caught him, he presented as his justification that the woman who had committed fornication with him, although already old in years and outdated, showed him this obscene way of acting and taught him how to do and scatter his filthy effluents over the earth.

Hl. 3. Such are their abominable actions, which deceive their minds, because of the blindness of the devil. I do not consider it necessary to present the testimonies on the basis of which they are subjected to fall, lest, wishing to tell a detailed account in order to turn away from the lawless action of each heresy, I should not rather direct the thought of people who are not strengthened and are always capable of relaxation, inclined to catch evil instead of good. But in order to turn away from this terrible heresy peculiar to reptiles, I will offer only a few of the many.

Whence did you, dear ones, get the thought of such a lawless act of yours? And first of all, to whom is all this not obvious, namely, that your teaching is demonic, that it is a trick invented by people who are deceived in their minds and corrupted? For if conception (in your opinion) is a completely evil deed, it is certainly not because of childbearing, but because of carnal copulation; Why, then, being overcome by voluptuousness, do you copulate with your body? But if carnal copulation is not a bad deed, then it is not a bad deed that that which is conceived by means of copulation should be made begotten. By refusing this, a person does not need to cultivate the land. Abel, for example, was a shepherd of sheep, and Cain tilled the land. Some till the earth like Noah, who was a man who made the land, and plant vineyards (Gen. 9:20); And he planted grapes, but not that there might be no grapes on them; but plant and drink of this fruit, and drink, as it is written (Gen. 9:21). The elder can be forgiven for this. Being pleasing to God, he fell into intoxication not because of intemperance, but perhaps out of sorrow he fell into a state of unconsciousness, and unable to endure the effect of both causes, through weakness and old age he fell into infirmity, but did not deserve the ridicule of his son. And he who laughs has acquired a curse for himself, as an example that those who insult their parents will be punished, as well as the thoughts that rise up in you against the mind of God and against the well-ordered order.

Hl. 4. Though marriage is not so praiseworthy as virginity, though virginity is higher than it, and true and undefiled virginity is called glorious and virtuous: nevertheless marriage is honorable if it has the purpose of childbearing, and does not turn the beautifully created from God to a shameful end, but properly observes the order of marital communion established by God. True virginity is such as the Holy Apostle praises it: a virgin and an unintruder cares for the things of the Lord, that she may please the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit (1 Corinthians 7:34); By this he showed that loneliness does not give any reason even for the suspicion of misdeeds. But we know that Abraham also begat children, and yet he was a friend of God, and Isaac, and Jacob, and so forth. They did not defile themselves with lawless deeds, for they did not touch abominations, nor were they hostile to procreation, which was beautifully arranged by God, and those who labored among them in chastity and virginity did not violate the laws of podvig, and did not distort the laudable image of asceticism, putting on it as if in jest. Elijah hardly entered into the cities at all, nor was he a companion with women, but was constantly in the wilderness; and Elisha, and John, and all who, having in mind this great image of following the angels, according to the Gospel commandment of the Lord, distorted for themselves the Kingdom of Heaven (Matt. 19:12).

We would have much to say about this, and in many passages of the Divine Scriptures we could expose their thoughts, to the ridicule of which the devil put into them, but we are not satisfied with much. For it is quite evident that such a deed is not from their understanding, nor from God, but by the work of the demons this mockery and their fall into lawless deed. Having repelled this heresy, as it were, a terrible serpent, called viper, which is small in stature, but emits a breath terrible in its venom and brings destruction to those who approach it, — having crushed it, let us pass on to the following heresies, calling upon God for help in the accomplishment of all our work in God.

Against Origen Adamant, the Forty-Fourth and Sixty-Fourth Heresies