Serious things breed sects

Then, as if bringing a charge against the word, he reproaches us with the sects within Christianity, saying: “But once they had spread into a multitude, they split and are cut apart again, and each group wants factions of its own.” And he says that “being divided again because of their numbers, they refute one another; they still have, so to speak, one thing in common, if indeed they have even that: the name; and this alone they are nevertheless ashamed to abandon; in everything else they are ranged one here, another there.”

To this too we shall say that differing sects have never arisen in any matter unless its first principle is serious and useful to life. Since medicine is useful and necessary to the human race, and many questions are raised in it about how bodies should be treated, for this reason there are admittedly many sects in medicine among the Greeks, and I think also among the barbarians, at least among all who profess to practise medicine. Again, since philosophy professes truth and the knowledge of things that are, lays down how one ought to live, and tries to teach what benefits our race, while the matters it inquires into allow wide differences of view, for this reason a great many sects have arisen in philosophy, some more famous, others less so. And Judaism too found occasion for sects to arise in the differing interpretation of the writings of Moses and the words of the prophets.

So then, since Christianity appeared to people as something worthy of reverence, not only, as Celsus supposes, to the more slavish, but also to many of the learned among the Greeks, sects necessarily arose, not altogether because of factions and love of strife, but because a number of the learned too were eager to understand the teachings of Christianity. From this it followed that, as they interpreted differently the words that all alike believed to be divine, sects arose named after men who admired the first principle of the word, yet were moved somehow by certain plausible arguments to their disagreements with one another.

But no one could reasonably shun medicine because of the sects within it, nor would anyone who aims at what is fitting hate philosophy, using its many sects as a pretext for hating it. So neither should the sacred books of Moses and the prophets be condemned because of the sects among the Jews.