apostolicfathers0201clem - Carmel Apologetics

THE GENUINENESS. 87
oratorical passage, it must be confessed) gives Sige a place
in the
systems of Simon, Cerinthus, and others {Orat. xxv. § 8, i. p. 460),
while Irenaeus himself {Hacr.
i. 11. i) states that Valentinus borrowed
his theory with modifications from earlier Gnostics. The discovery of
the treatise of Hippolytus has confirmed the justice of this reply. In
one passage (vi. 22) this scourge of heretics speaks
of 'that Silence on
which the Greeks are always harping ' (77 v/xvov/xeV/ iKeivr] irapa rots
'EWijcrt cnyrj) ; in another (vi. 21)
he states that Valentinus founded
his system on that of Simon; and in a third (vi. 18) he quotes a passage
from the Great Announcefnenf, attributed to Simon himself but probably
written by one of his followers, in which his primary power or emanation
is
styled Sige'.
At all events it
ought to have been clear from the context that, if
there be any polemical reference in the words, the heresy assailed cannot
be the Valentinian, for the whole argument is directed, as I have
already shown, against Judaizmg Gnostics, and Valentinus was the
very opposite of this. But the whole objection collapses, now that the
true reading
of the text is discovered. The words diStos ovk must be
struck out, as I have shown elsewhere (11. p. 126 sq), alike on grounds
Theogonia From the context we may
'.
infer that the passage to which Irenaus
refers under the name Theogonia was taken
from the 'AippoSirris yoval of this poet,
as Grabe suggested. Meineke {Fragni.
Com. I.
p. 318 sq) begs the question,
when he impugns the explicit and detailed
statement of Irenjeus on the ground
that Sige or Silence was first introduced
by the Neoplatonists and Gnostics.
^
Card. Newman {Essays
I. p. •249)
writes of this supposed reference to the
Valentinian Sige; 'This was the only
point discoverable in the text of the
shorter Epistles which really had to be
reconciled with the maintenance of their
genuineness.
Illud non negaverim, says
Voss, si locus hie sit samis et haec dcsumpta
sint ex haeresi Valentiniana, actum videri
de Epistolis Ignatianis.
Accordingly
Pearson devotes as many as forty-six
folio columns of his great work to solve
the apparent difficulty, at the end of
which he says, Quatuor assertiones aituli,
omncs exploratae veritatis, ita tamen comparatae,
itt si vel una earum vera sit, ea
iinica omnem argumenti adversariortim
vim elidat (p. 390).
And after Pearson,
Bull devotes another series of twenty
columns to complete the explanation'. [I
might add that Matt, de Larroque (see
above, p. 334) occupies a hundred pages
or more of his work in refuting Pearson
on this point.] 'In our time the difficulty
has solved itself; and consistently
with the arguments of those Anglican
divines. From the newly discovered
work on Heresies, commonly attributed
to Hippolytus, etc'
Card. Newman correctly regards this as
the one real point of difliculty; but the
solution is different from and much more
satisfactory than that which he adopts.
Hi motus animorum atque haec certamina
tanta
Pulveris exigui jactu compressa quiescunt.
A handful of critical small dust has
quieted this conflict of giants.
25-