Poison cabinet

This is the first part of Epiphanius' notorious work Panarion (“Medicine Chest”), covering sects 1 to 46. Epiphanius was bishop of Salamis on Cyprus. Panarion is his sustained attack on various Christian “sects” the official Church considered heretical. The work was originally published around AD 380. It's of considerable interest to scholars, since Epiphanius often quotes or references documents otherwise long lost. He also describes the rituals of the “heretics” he attacks. The full heresiology covers 80 sects.

To a causal reader, by contrast, Panarion looks confusing and not a little dismaying. I admit that I only read or skimmed a few chapters of this poison cabinet! The old bishop of Salamis represents everything that is wrong with a certain kind of intolerant, dogmatic and “orthodox” Christianity. His opponents aren't simply wrong or misguided, they are invariably described as venomous beasts in liaison with the Devil, and usually attacked for various sexual deviancies, too. The followers of the various heretical sects are portrayed as silly, gullibly and (often) women.

Here is a typical tirade: “A certain Marcus, the founder of the so-called Marcosians, came from the Gnostics and dared to vomit evils into the world that were different from theirs. For he succeeded Secundus, Epiphanes, Ptolemy and Valentinus, but was inspired to gather a further crowd of tramps. For the wretch attracted female and male dupes of his own, and was supposed to be a corrector of the cheats we have mentioned since he was the most adept in magical trickery. But because he deceived all these men and women into regarding him as the most gnostic of all and possessed of the greatest power from the unseen, ineffable realms, he has truly been shown to be the forerunner of the Antichrist.”

And yes, one of the later volumes of this work mentions the inevitable Messalians…

True, some of the “heretics” described by Epiphanius seems to have been a pretty weird bunch. Thus, we get to meet the Cainites, who claimed that Judas was the good guy and betrayed Jesus as part of the divine plan. They also revered Cain and the Sodomites! The Sethians, by contrast, considered Cain evil. They worshipped a female god, claimed descent from Adam's righteous son Seth, and regarded Christ as his reincarnation. The Ophites, trumping them all, worshipped the snake in Eden and used a real snake at their communion table… Apart from this Gnostic undergrowth, however, Epiphanius also condemns groups that seem much more serious, such as the Valentinians, various Judeo-Christians and (surprise) the Jews themselves.

Of course, if another pretender to the imperial purple would have carried the day, the “Trinitarians” with their “abominable and wicked rites of cannibalism” and their “unnatural vices at confession” which “trick foolish women” would have been condemned instead, with the Panarion presumably consigned to the flames. And if Julian the Apostate had succeeded in restoring freedom of worship, we presumably would have been spared all this crap en toto…

There are plenty of divergences even in the New Testament, if you care to look for them. Even if we assume that the appearance of Jesus was a supernatural event of some sort, his followers clearly related to it in very different ways. Perhaps that's inevitable. Perhaps the appearance of a myriad sects is also inevitable. Eventually one of them will declare itself the Only True One, and go on a heresy-hunt. What isn't inevitable, surely, is that a string of emperors decide to promote the Only True One, creating a mind-set still 1,700 years later that there is only one true political ideology, only one true economic system, only one true science, only one true technology and only one true path of progress. God might be one, but this is ridiculous!

Somehow, I think this mindset began about the time Epiphanius looked into his medicine chest and found...the spirit of Theodosius the Great.