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Against the Donatists
St Optatus of Milevis, tr. Vassall-Phillips, 1917
Book 4, 8. That Heretics are Children of Adulterers
And with regard to that which you have quoted from the Prophet Solomon1:
‘The children of adulterers shall not come to perfection, and bastard slips cannot take deep roots,’
this may well be understood to have been said in a literal sense. For, if you take it figuratively, you have excused those who are actually guilty of adultery. But grant that it was said in figure. In that case it has been spoken of heretics, whose sacraments are like invalid wedlock, in whose beds is to be found iniquity, where the very seeds [of life] have been corrupted to the destruction of the Faith.2
When Valentinus maintains that the Son of God was on earth in a phantasm, not in Flesh, he corrupted his own faith and that of his followers. The seed of [spiritual] birth has been rooted out in those who have not believed that the Son of God was born in the Flesh of Mary the Virgin, and that in the Flesh He suffered.
Notes
- Sap. iii, 16; iv, 3: filios adulterorum inconsummatos et spuria vitulamina altas radices dare non posse. (Vulgate: ‘Filii adulterorum in inconsummatione erunt, et spuria vitulamina non dabunt radices altas.’)
- apud quos sunt sacramentorum falsa connubia, et in quorum toris iniquitas invenitur, ubi in exterminium Fidei corrupta sunt semina. For toris Du Pin reads choris with v. But the MSS, have toris, and the reference to Sap. iii, 16 makes this reading certain (cf. also note 4, p. 18).