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Werke Asterius Urbanus The Extant Writings of Asterius Urbanus

ii. from book i.

Now the attitude of opposition 1 which they have assumed, and this new heresy of theirs which puts them in a position of separation from the Church, had their origin in the following manner. There is said to be a certain village called Ardaba 2 in the Mysia, which touches Phrygia. 3 There, they say, one of those who had been but recently converted to the faith, a person of the name of Montanus, when Gratus was proconsul of Asia, gave the adversary entrance against himself by the excessive lust of his soul after taking the lead. And this person was carried away in spirit; 4 and suddenly being seized with a kind of frenzy and ecstasy, he raved, and began to speak and to utter strange things, and to prophesy in a manner contrary to the custom of the Church, as handed down from early times and preserved thenceforward in a continuous succession. And among those who were present on that occasion, and heard those spurious utterances, there were some who were indignant, and rebuked him as one frenzied, and under the power of demons, and possessed by the spirit of delusion, and agitating the multitude, and debarred him from speaking any more; for they were mindful of the Lord's distinction 5 and threatening, whereby He warned them to be on their guard vigilantly against the coming of the false prophets. But there were others too, who, as if elated by the Holy Spirit and the prophetic gift, and not a little puffed up, and forgetting entirely the Lord's distinction, challenged the maddening and insidious and seductive spirit, being themselves cajoled and misled by him, so that there was no longer any checking him to silence. 6 And thus by a kind of artifice, or rather by such a process of craft, the devil having devised destruction against those who were disobedient to the Lord's warning, and being unworthily honoured by them, secretly excited and inflamed their minds that had already left the faith which is according to truth, in order to play the harlot with error. 7 For he stirred up two others also, women, and filled them with the spurious spirit, so that they too spoke in a frenzy and unseasonably, and in a strange manner, like the person already mentioned, while the spirit called them happy as they rejoiced and exulted proudly at his working, and puffed them up by the magnitude of his promises; while, on the other hand, at times also he condemned them skilfully and plausibly, in order that he might seem to them also to have the power of reproof. 8 And those few who were thus deluded were Phrygians. But the same arrogant spirit taught them to revile the Church universal under heaven, because that false spirit of prophecy found neither honour from it nor entrance into it. For when the faithful throughout Asia met together often and in many places of Asia for deliberation on this subject, and subjected those novel doctrines to examination, and declared them to be spurious, and rejected them as heretical, they were in consequence of that expelled from the Church and debarred from communion. 9


  1. enstasis. ↩

  2. Ardabau. One codex makes it Ardabab ↩

  3. en te kataten phrugian Musi'a. Rufinus renders it, apud Phrygiam Mysiae civitatem; others render it, apud Mysiam Phrygiae; Migne takes it as defining this Mysia to be the Asiatic one, in distinction from the European territory, which the Latins called Moesia, but the Greeks also Musi'a. ↩

  4. pneumatophorethenai. ↩

  5. diastoles. ↩

  6. eis to` meke'ti kolu'esthai siopan. ↩

  7. te`n apokekoimeme'nen, etc; the verb being used literally of the wife who proves false to her marriage vow. ↩

  8. elenktiko'n. Montanus, that is to say, or the demon that spake by Montanus, knew that it had been said of old by the Lord, that when the Spirit came He would convince or reprove the world of sin; and hence this false spirit, with the view of confirming his hearers in the belief that he was the true Spirit of God, sometimes rebuked and condemned them. See a passage in Ambrose's Epistle to the Thessal., ch. v. (Migne). ↩

  9. [Vol. ii. [207]pp. 4, 5.] ↩

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The Extant Writings of Asterius Urbanus
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Theologische Fakultät, Patristik und Geschichte der alten Kirche
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