ABSTRACT
So, after you say [in your profession], “I renounce Satan,” you continue on by adding, “all his angels.” You name all those serving his will as men who stumble and err like Satan. We should, therefore, consider angels of Satan to be all who are immersed in profane wisdom, as well as those who introduce pagan error into the world. Partisans of Satan are clearly also all (380-1) the poets who have spread idolatry by means of their fables and have strengthened the erroneous beliefs of the pagans through their wisdom. Angels of Satan are also those who under the guise of philosophy have devised the dangerous teachings of the pagans and so corrupted many that they do not adhere [any longer] to what [the true] religion affirms. Angels of Satan, too, are the heretical leaders who have all spoken falsely, after Christ our Lord’s coming, in the name of Christ and, although they are estranged from religion, have introduced their [heretical views] into the world. Angels of Satan are Mani, Marcion, and Valentinus, who have confined God’s creative power to visible realities, when they assert that there is another cause beside God as the reason why visible realities subsist. An angel of Satan is Paul of Samosata, who says that Christ our Lord is a mere man, and denies that the Only Begotten [Son] existing before the ages is a divine Person (hypostasis). Angels of Satan are also Arius and Eunomius, who dare to say that the divine nature of the Only Begotten is created and does not exist from the very beginning, but that He has come into being from nothing, as it has been determined for [all] creatures. They imitate pagan stories when they insist that the Son’s substance (ousia) is created and, like these [pagans], regard God as contrary to what He is by His nature. They imitate the failure of the Jews, who do not confess that the Son proceeds from the Father and that there is no beginning for his ousia, for He is truly the true Son. Rather they say that He is the Son in the same way that the Jews call those who are sons of God by grace and who do not possess sonship by ousia.
