Knowing that he that is such is perverted, and sins, being condemned of himself.
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Cyprian of Carthage
AD 258
The church cannot be rent or divided against itself. It maintains the unity of a single, indivisible house…. All who are to live and escape the destruction of the world must be gathered into one house alone, the church. If any of the gathered goes outside, that is, if anyone who once obtained grace in the church nevertheless abandons the church, his blood will be upon his head. He will have himself to blame for his damnation. The apostle Paul explains this, directing us to avoid a heretic as perverted, sinful and selfcondemned.
But if everywhere heretics are called nothing else than adversaries and antichrists, if they are pronounced to be people to be avoided, and to be perverted and condemned of their own selves, wherefore is it that they should not be thought worthy of being condemned by us, since it is evident from the apostolic testimony
Knowing that he that is such a one is subverted: a metaphor, from a house that is thrown down, even to the foundation, by the Greek. He speaks of heretics whose obstinacy seems evident, for no one is properly a heretic but who is obstinate in his errors.
And sinneth, being condemned; or, condemned by his own judgment, when his ignorance cannot be a sufficient plea for him. (Witham)
Other offenders are judged and cast out of the Church by the sentence of the pastors of the same Church. Heretics, more unhappy, run out of the Church of their own accord; and by so doing, give judgment and sentence against their own souls. (Challoner)
For the heretic damns himself when he casts himself out of the Catholic church and under no compulsion leaves the gathering of the saints. He who separates himself from everyone by his own judgment shows what is merited from everyone. The heretic himself, I say, damns himself because, although all the wicked are cast out from the Christian assembly by the sentence of the bishop, the heretic departs himself, by the judgment of his own will, before anyone’s subsequent wishes are expressed.
It is the same Paul who, in his epistle to the Galatians, counts “heresies” among “the sins of the flesh,” who also intimates to Titus that “a man who is a heretic” must be “rejected after the first admonition.” This is on the ground that “he that is perverted and commits sin as a selfcondemned man.” Indeed, in almost every epistle, when enjoining on us [the duty] of avoiding false doctrines, he sharply condemns heresies. Of these the practical effects are false doctrines, called in Greek heresis, a word used in the sense of that choice which a man makes when he either teaches them [to others] or takes up with them [for himself]. For this reason it is that he calls the heretic selfcondemned, because he has himself chosen that in which he is condemned.
