Against Marcion 1.13–1.23

When we drive out by this step a god for whom no creation of his own has set up in advance a witness as proper and as worthy of God as the Creator's, the most shameless Marcionites, wrinkling their noses, turn to demolishing the Creator's works. “Of course,” they say, “a great work, worthy of God, is the world!” Is the Creator, then, not God at all? Certainly he is God. Then neither is the world unworthy of God; for God would have made nothing unworthy of himself, even though he made the world for man and not for himself, and even though every work is inferior to its maker. And yet, if it is unworthy of God to have made something of a certain kind, how much more unworthy of God is it to have made nothing at all! … even something unworthy, so that he might be hoped to be the author of worthier things as well.

To say something, then, even about this supposedly unworthy world — which among the Greeks too has a name meaning ornament and adornment, not filth — those very professors of wisdom from whose minds every heresy draws its life declared these “unworthy” substances to be gods: Thales water, Heraclitus fire, Anaximenes air, Anaximander all the heavenly bodies, Strato heaven and earth, Zeno air and ether, Plato the stars, which he calls the fiery race of gods. For concerning the world — considering its greatness, force, power, honour, and beauty, and the help, faithfulness, and law of the several elements, which conspire to generate, nourish, complete, and renew all things — they were afraid, as most of the natural philosophers were, lest its substances, so great as they are, should be thought less than divine; and these substances the magi of the Persians, the hierophants of the Egyptians, and the gymnosophists of the Indians also worship. Even the common superstition of popular idolatry, when it is ashamed of the names and fables of the dead of old in its images, takes refuge in interpreting them as natural things and cloaks its disgrace with cleverness: it figures Jupiter as fiery substance and his Juno as airy, following the sound of the Greek words; likewise Vesta as fire, the Camenae as water, and the Great Mother as the earth, reaped for its seed, ploughed with arms, watered with washings. So too, because Osiris is forever being buried, sought alive, and found with joy, they argue from him the reliability of the returning crops, the living elements, and the recurring year; just as the lions of Mithras philosophize the mysteries of dry and burning nature. And for the substances higher in place or state it is enough that they have more readily been held to be gods than unworthy of God. Shall I come down to lowly things? One little flower from the hedgerows — I do not say from the meadows; one little shell from any sea — I do not say from the Red Sea; one little feather of a grouse — I say nothing of the peacock: will it tell you that the Creator is a shabby craftsman?

But when you mock even the smaller animals, which the greatest Craftsman has deliberately enlarged with skill or strength — teaching in this way that greatness is proved in smallness, just as power is in weakness, according to the apostle — imitate, if you can, the bee's buildings, the ant's granaries, the spider's webs, the silkworm's threads; endure, if you can, those very beasts of your bed and your mat, the blister-beetle's poison, the fly's sting, the gnat's trumpet and lance. What will the greater things be like, when you are either helped or harmed by such small ones? — so that you should not despise the Creator even in small things. Finally, look around at yourself, consider man inside and out: will even this work of our God please you, which your lord, that better god, loved so much, for whose sake he took the trouble to come down from the third heaven into these poor elements, for whose cause he was even crucified in this little cell of the Creator? He, at least, has not to this day rejected the Creator's water, with which he washes his own, nor the oil with which he anoints his own, nor the mixture of honey and milk with which he feeds his own as infants, nor the bread by which he represents his very body, needing even in his own sacraments the beggarly elements of the Creator. But you, a disciple above your master and a servant above your lord, are wiser than he, destroying what he desires. I want to see whether you are at least sincere, so that you yourself do not covet what you destroy. You are against heaven, and yet in your houses you seek the freedom of heaven; you despise the earth — plainly the mother of your flesh, which you now treat as an enemy — and yet you wring out all its marrow for your food; you reject the sea too, but only up to its produce, which you reckon a holier food. If I offer you a rose, you will not scorn the Creator. Hypocrite! Even if you were to prove yourself a Marcionite — that is, a repudiator of the Creator — by starving yourself to death (for that is what you ought to seek among you in place of martyrdom, if the world displeased you), into whatever matter you are dissolved, you will be making use of the Creator's substance. How great is the obstinacy of your hardness! You depreciate the things in which you both live and die.

After this, or before it, you will say that he too has his own creation, his own world, and his own heaven — about that third heaven we shall see, if we come to discussing your apostle as well. Meanwhile, whatever his substance is, it ought surely to have appeared along with its god. But as it is, how can it be that the lord was revealed in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, while his substance has not been discovered at all even by now, the fifteenth year of the emperor Severus? Since it surpasses the Creator's trifles, it would surely have ceased to lie hidden once its lord and author was no longer hidden. And so, if it could not itself be shown in this world, how did its lord appear in this world? If this world held the lord, why could it not hold his substance — unless perhaps the substance was greater than its lord?

Now comes the question of place, which concerns both that higher world and its god himself. For see: if he too has his own world beneath him, above the Creator, he must have made it in a place, whose space lay empty between his own feet and the Creator's head. So God himself was in a place and was making the world in a place, and that place will now be greater than both God and the world; for what contains is always greater than what is contained. And we must see whether some leftover plots are not still empty there, in which some third god could squeeze himself in with his world. So start counting gods now. For the place too will be a god, not only as greater than God but also as unborn and unmade and therefore eternal and equal to God, the place in which God has always been. Next, if he too built his world out of some underlying matter, unborn, unmade, and coeval with God, as Marcion holds concerning the Creator, you reduce this too to the majesty of the place, which has enclosed both God and matter, two gods. For matter too is a god according to the form of divinity, being unborn, unmade, and eternal. Or if he built the world out of nothing, Marcion will be compelled to hold this of the Creator as well, to whom he assigns matter as the substance of the world. But he too will have to have made it out of matter, since the same reasoning that is set against the Creator confronts him as well, as being equally God. And so for the moment count me three gods of Marcion: the maker, the place, and the matter. In the same way he puts the Creator in a place, reckoning him surely on the same terms, and assigns him matter, surely unborn and unmade and on that account eternal, like its lord. Further, by ascribing evil to matter — unborn to the unborn, unmade to the unmade, eternal to the eternal — he has now made a fourth god. You have, then, three substances of divinity in the higher realm and four in the lower. When their own Christs are added to these — one who appeared under Tiberius, the other who is promised by the Creator — Marcion is plainly wronged by those who presume that he introduces two gods, since he assigns nine, though without knowing it.

Since, then, no other world appears, any more than its god does, it follows that they divide the two kinds of things, visible and invisible, between two gods as their authors, and so claim the invisible things for their own god. But who could bring himself to believe — unless it be a heretical spirit — that the invisible things belong to him who has set forth nothing visible, rather than to him who, by making the visible things, has also created faith in the invisible, when it is much more just to give assent on the strength of some samples than of none? We shall see to which author the apostle too ascribes the invisible things, when we have examined him as well. For now, mostly by common sense and sound arguments, we are laying the ground of faith for the appeal to the Scriptures that is to follow, confirming that this diversity of visible and invisible is to be ascribed to God the Creator, just as his whole work consists of diversities: of corporeal and incorporeal, animate and inanimate, vocal and mute, moving and stationary, fertile and barren, dry and moist, hot and cold. So too diversity has tempered man himself, both in body and in feeling: some members strong, others weak; some honourable, others dishonourable; some paired, others single; some matching, others unmatched. So also in feeling: now joy, now anxiety; now love, now hatred; now anger, now gentleness. If it is so, that this universe of creation has been composed of parts that rival one another, then invisible things too are owed to the visible, and are to be ascribed to no other author than the one to whom their rivals are ascribed. Those who brand the Creator himself as inconsistent — commanding what he forbade and forbidding what he commanded, striking and healing — why do they take him as uniform in this one respect, as maker of visible things only, when he should likewise be believed to have made both visible and invisible, just as both life and death, both evils and peace? And surely, if those invisible things are greater than the Creator's visible things, which are great in their own place, it is fitting in this way too that the greater should belong to him to whom the great belong; for neither great things, still less greater, belong to one to whom not even small things are shown to belong.

Hard pressed by these arguments, they burst out: “This one work is enough for our god: that he has set man free by his supreme and pre-eminent goodness, which is to be preferred to all your locusts.” O greater god, whose work, great as it is, could be found only in the man of a lesser god! But first you must prove that he exists, through the means by which God must be proved — through works — and only then through benefits. For first it is asked whether he exists, and then what he is like; the one is discerned from works, the other from benefits. Besides, it is not established that he exists because he is said to have set man free; rather, if it is established that he exists, then he will also be said to have set man free, so that it may be established whether he did, since he could both exist and not have set man free. How, then, because he is said to have set man free, will he be believed to exist, when he could both exist and not have set man free?

Now, in this part of the question of the unknown god, if it has been sufficiently established that he created nothing as surely as that he ought to have created, so as to be known from his works — since, if he had existed, he ought to have been known, and indeed from the beginning of things, for it would not have befitted God to lie hidden — I must go back to the root of the question of the unknown god, so as to shake down its other twigs too. For first it must be asked why he who afterwards brought himself forward into knowledge did so afterwards and not from the beginning of things. For these he was surely necessary, as God — and indeed, the better, the more necessary — and he ought not to have lain hidden. For it cannot be said that there was no material or cause for knowing God, since man, whom he now succours, was in the world from the beginning, and so was the Creator's malice, against which, as the good god, he brings succour. Therefore he was either ignorant of the cause and material of his necessary revelation, or doubted, or could not, or would not. All these are unworthy of God, above all of the supremely good. But we shall fill out this topic elsewhere with a reproach of his late revelation, as now with a demonstration only.

Suppose, then, that he has now come forward into knowledge when he wished, when he could, when the fated hour arrived. For perhaps the ascending node stood in his way, or some malignant stars, or Saturn in quartile, or Mars in trine. For the Marcionites are very much given to astrology, and are not ashamed even of this: of making their living from the Creator's own stars. Here we must deal with the quality of the revelation: whether he was revealed in a worthy manner, so that it may be established whether truly, and so that he may be believed to exist whose worthy revelation has been established. For what is worthy of God will prove God. We lay down that God is first to be known by nature and then recognized by teaching: by nature from his works, by teaching from his proclamations. But one who has no nature of his own has no natural instruments at hand. He ought therefore at least to have wrought his revelation by proclamations, especially since he had to be revealed against one who, by so many and such great works both of creation and of proclamation, had yet scarcely filled man with faith. How, then, was he known? If by human conjecture, I deny that God can be known otherwise than through himself — appealing not only to the pattern of the Creator but also to the condition both of divine greatness and of human smallness — lest man should seem greater than God, as having dragged him out by his own powers, as it were, into the public light of acknowledgment when he did not of his own accord wish to be known; since human smallness, as the experience of every age shows, knows how to invent gods for itself more easily than to follow the true one, whom men already understand by nature. Otherwise, if man is to invent a god in this way — as Romulus did Consus, Tatius Cloacina, Hostilius Fear, Metellus Alburnus, and a certain person not long ago Antinous — others will be allowed to do it too. We know Marcion as a shipmaster, not as a king or an emperor.

“On the contrary,” say the Marcionites, “our god, even if not from the beginning, even if not through creation, has been revealed through himself in Christ Jesus.” A book will be devoted to Christ as well, on his whole state — for the subjects must be kept apart, so that they may be treated more fully and in better order. Meanwhile it will be enough, at this stage, to meet them by showing, and that briefly, that Christ carried about the laws of no other god than the Creator. In the fifteenth year of Tiberius Christ Jesus deigned to flow down from heaven. In what year of the elder Antoninus the saving spirit of Marcion, as he would have it, breathed out of his Pontus like a dog-day wind, I have not troubled to find out. This much, however, is agreed: he is an Antonine heretic, impious under Pius. Now from Tiberius to Antoninus there are about one hundred and fifteen and a half years and half a month. They put just that much time between Christ and Marcion. Since, then, it was under Antoninus that Marcion first introduced this god, as we have proved, the matter is at once plain, if you have any sense: the dates prejudge that what first came forward under Antoninus did not come forward under Tiberius; that is, that the god of Antoninus's reign was not the god of Tiberius's, and so that he was not revealed by Christ who, it is agreed, was first proclaimed by Marcion.

To prove now that this is agreed, I shall take what remains from our opponents themselves. The separation of the law and the gospel is Marcion's own and principal work, and his disciples cannot deny what they hold in their chief document, by which they are initiated into this heresy and hardened in it. For this is Marcion's Antitheses, that is, “Contrary Oppositions,” which try to set the gospel at odds with the law, so that from the difference between the sayings of the two documents they may argue a difference of gods as well. Since, then, it is precisely that separation of law and gospel that has insinuated another god of the gospel over against the god of the law, it is evident that before that separation the god who became known from the argument of separation was not known; and so that he was not revealed by Christ, who lived before the separation, but was invented by Marcion, who set up the separation against the peace of gospel and law — a peace which, from the appearing of Christ to the audacity of Marcion, had been kept unharmed and unshaken by that reasoning which held no other god of both law and gospel than the Creator, against whom, so long afterwards, separation was let loose by the man of Pontus.

To this most straightforward proof we must add a defence against the clamour of the other side. For they say that Marcion did not so much innovate the rule by separating law and gospel as restore it after it had earlier been adulterated. O Christ, most patient Lord, who put up with the perversion of your preaching for so many years, until, of course, Marcion should come to your rescue! For they also bring up Peter himself and the others, the pillars of the apostleship, as having been rebuked by Paul for not walking with a straight foot toward the truth of the gospel — by that Paul, surely, who, still raw in grace and indeed anxious lest he had run or was running in vain, was then conferring for the first time with the apostles who came before him. If, then, still fervent as a neophyte against Judaism, he thought something in their conduct deserved rebuke — namely, their table-fellowship that shifted with the company — though afterwards he himself was in practice to become all things to all, that he might gain all, to the Jews as a Jew and to those under the law as under the law: do you want that rebuke, which concerned conduct alone, and conduct that would later please its own accuser, to be held suspect of a betrayal of the preaching about God as well? On the contrary, concerning the unity of the preaching, as we read above, they had joined right hands, and by the very division of their tasks had agreed on their partnership in the gospel; as he says elsewhere too: “Whether it was I or they, so we preach.”

And even if he wrote that certain false brothers had crept in who wanted to transfer the Galatians to another gospel, he himself shows that this adulteration of the gospel aimed not at transferring them to faith in another god and Christ but at keeping the discipline of the law: he catches them, that is, insisting on circumcision and observing times and days and months and years of Jewish ceremonies, which they ought to have recognized as already set aside according to the renewed arrangement of the Creator, who had long ago proclaimed this very thing through his prophets. So through Isaiah: “The old things have passed away,” he says; “behold, the new things which I now make.” So too through Jeremiah: “And I will make a covenant, not such as I made with your fathers when I brought them out of the land of Egypt”; and elsewhere: “Break up for yourselves new fallow ground, and be circumcised to your God, and circumcise the foreskins of your heart.” So the apostle, establishing this circumcision and this new ground, was dissuading them from those old ceremonies as well, which their own founder declared would one day cease, through Hosea: “And I will turn away all her mirth, and her feast days, and new moons, and sabbaths, and all her ceremonies.” So too through Isaiah: “Your new moons and sabbaths and the great day I cannot bear; your holidays and fasting and feast days my soul hates.” If, then, the Creator had long since rejected all these things and the apostle was declaring that they must now be rejected, the apostle's very judgment, in agreement with the Creator's decrees, proves that no other god was preached by the apostle than the one whose decrees he wished now to be acknowledged; and in this cause he brands as false both the apostles and the brothers who were transferring the gospel of the Creator's Christ from the newness foretold by the Creator to the oldness rejected by the Creator.

Besides, if, in preaching a new god, he wished to exclude the law of the old God, why does he lay down nothing about the new god but only about the old law — unless because, while faith in the Creator remained, only his law was to cease? As that psalm had sung beforehand: “Let us break their bonds from us and cast away their yoke from us” — from the time, that is, when “the nations raged and the peoples meditated vain things; the kings of the earth stood up, and the rulers gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ.” And surely, if another god were being preached by Paul, there would be no dispute whether the law was to be kept or not, since it would not belong to the new lord, the rival of the law. For the very newness and difference of the god would have removed not only the question of an old and alien law but all mention of it. But this was the whole state of the question: how, when the same God of the law was being preached in Christ, his law could be set aside. Faith, then, always stood firm in the Creator and his Christ, but conduct and discipline wavered. For some disputed about eating what had been sacrificed to idols, others about the veiling of women, others about marriages and divorces, some even about the hope of the resurrection; about God, no one. For if this question too had been disputed, it would also be found in the apostle, and all the more as the principal question.

But if after the times of the apostles the truth suffered adulteration concerning the rule of God, then the apostolic tradition in its own time suffered none concerning the rule of God; and no other tradition of the apostles is to be acknowledged than that which is set forth today in their own churches. But you will find no church of apostolic stock that is not Christian in the Creator. Or if these are to have been corrupt from the beginning, which will be sound? The Creator's opponents, no doubt! Produce, then, one of your churches of apostolic stock, and you will have carried the case. Since, then, it is established in every way that there was no other god in the rule of this sacred pledge from Christ down to Marcion than the Creator, our proof is now sufficiently fortified, by which we have shown that knowledge of the heretical god began from the separation of gospel and law; and the earlier definition is also supported, that no god is to be believed whom a man has composed from his own mind — unless, plainly, he is a prophet, that is, one who does not speak from his own mind. If Marcion can be called that, it will also have to be proved … there will be no need to discuss it further. For with this wedge of truth every heresy is driven out, once Christ is shown to be the bearer of no other god than the Creator.

But how is the antichrist to be overthrown from the foundation, unless, the defence by prescription being relaxed, room is also given for crushing his other insinuations? Let us come, then, from here to the very person of the god — or rather to his shadow and phantom, like his Christ — and let him be examined by that for which he is preferred to the Creator. And surely there will be sure rules for examining the goodness of a god. But first I must find it and lay hold of it, and so bring it to the rules. For when I look around at the times, it is nowhere to be found from the beginning of the materials and the entry of the causes with which it ought to have been found, acting from the moment it had occasion to act. For there already was death, and sin, the sting of death, and the very malice of the Creator, against which the other god's goodness ought to have brought help, meeting this first rule of divine goodness, if it would prove itself natural: helping at once, as soon as the cause arose. For everything in God must be natural and inborn, so as to be eternal according to his state, lest it be reckoned accidental and external and therefore temporal and foreign to eternity. So in God a goodness perpetual and unbroken will be required, which, stored and ready in the treasuries of his natural properties, would precede its causes and materials and take up each as it first arose — not despise and abandon it, if it was there before.

In short, I shall ask here no less why his goodness did not work from the beginning than we asked about him why he was not revealed from the beginning. Why not, indeed? He had to be revealed through his goodness, if he existed at all. What God may not do is to be unable, still less to fail to exercise his natural properties; for if these are held back from running their course, they will not be natural. Nature knows no idleness of its own; it is judged by its acting. So neither will he seem to have been unwilling for a while to exercise his goodness, if it is by nature; for nature cannot be unwilling to be itself, since it so directs itself that if it ceased it would not exist. But goodness in Marcion's god did at one time cease from its work: therefore it was not natural goodness, since it could at some time cease, which natural things may not. And if it is not natural, it must no longer be believed eternal or equal to God: not eternal, because not natural, and establishing no perpetuity for itself from the past nor promising it for the future. For as it was not from the beginning, so without doubt it will not be to the end; it can cease to exist at some time, as it once did not exist.

Since, then, it is established that the goodness of that god ceased at the beginning — for he did not set man free from the beginning — and that it ceased by will rather than by weakness, the will that suppressed goodness will now be found to be the height of malice. For what is so malicious as to refuse to help when you can, to torment what is useful, to allow injury? In short, the whole indictment against the Creator will be written back against the one who aided his cruelties by the delay of his own goodness. For whoever has it in his hand to keep a thing from happening is held responsible for it when it happens. Man is condemned to death for tasting of one little tree; from then on sins advance with their penalties, and all now perish who have never known a single sod of paradise. And does some better god either not know this or put up with it? If he did so in order to be found better by it, how much the worse would the Creator be held! He is malicious enough in this plan too, since he both wanted the Creator to be burdened, letting his workings go on, and kept the world in distress. What will you judge of a physician who feeds a disease by delaying aid and prolongs the danger by postponing the remedy, so that he may cure it at a higher fee or with greater fame? Such is the sentence that must be passed on Marcion's god too: permitter of evil, abettor of injury, pander of grace, betrayer of kindness, which he did not show at once to its cause — as he plainly would have shown it, if he were good by nature and not by addition, supremely good by disposition and not by training, God from eternity and not from Tiberius — or rather, to speak more truly, from Cerdo and Marcion. Suppose now that this god did Tiberius the favour of having divine goodness dedicated on earth in his reign:

I hold up another rule against him: that, as everything in God must be natural, so it must be rational. I demand the reason of his goodness, since nothing else may be held good that is not rationally good, still less may goodness itself be found irrational. An evil in which there is some reason will more easily be taken for good than a good devoid of reason will escape being judged evil. I deny that the goodness of Marcion's god is rational, first on this ground: that it went forth to save a man who was a stranger to him. I know they will say that, on the contrary, this is the chief and perfect goodness, when it is poured out voluntarily and freely on strangers, without any debt of kinship; according to which we are commanded to love even our enemies, who on that account are strangers too. Why, then, did he not look upon man from the beginning, who was a stranger from the beginning? By holding back he prejudged that he had nothing to do with a stranger. Besides, the rule of loving the stranger or the enemy was preceded by the commandment to love your neighbour as yourself. Even though this comes from the Creator's law, you too must accept it, as not destroyed by Christ but rather built up. For you are commanded to love your enemy and the stranger so that you may love your neighbour all the more. The demand for goodness that is not owed is an intensifying of the goodness that is owed. But what is owed comes before what is not owed, as principal, as worthier, as prior to its servant and companion.

Since, then, the first reason of goodness is that it be shown to what is one's own, out of justice, and the second that it be shown to what is another's, out of a justice that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, how can the second reason be ascribed to one who lacks the first, having no man of his own, and whose goodness is therefore scanty? And how did a scanty goodness, which had nothing of its own, overflow onto what was another's? Show the principal reason, and then claim the one that follows. Nothing can be claimed as rational without order; far less can reason itself lose its order in anyone. Suppose now that the reason of goodness begins from the second step, toward the stranger: even that second step will not stand with reason, being destroyed in another way. For goodness even of the second kind, toward the stranger, will be held rational only if it works without injury to the one whose property he is. It is justice, first of all, that makes any goodness rational. Just as in the principal step, when shown to one's own, it will be rational if it is just, so toward the stranger too it can seem rational if it is not unjust. But what sort of goodness is it that stands by injury, and that for a stranger? For on behalf of one of one's own household an injurious goodness might perhaps be held rational to some extent. But on behalf of a stranger, to whom not even an honest goodness would lawfully be owed, by what reason will so unjust a goodness be defended as rational? For what is more unjust, more iniquitous and dishonest, than to do good to another man's slave in such a way that he is snatched from his master, claimed for another, suborned against his master's life — and, what is more shameful, while still in his master's house, still living from his master's granaries, still trembling under his master's blows? Such a claimant would be condemned even in this world — let alone a kidnapper. No differently … Marcion's god, breaking into another's world, snatches man from God, the son from the father, the nursling from the one who reared him, the servant from the master, so as to make him impious toward God, undutiful toward his father, ungrateful toward the one who reared him, worthless toward his master. I ask you: if a rational goodness makes a man like this, what would an irrational one make him? I could not think anyone more impudent than one who is baptized for another god in another's water, stretches out his hands to another god toward another's heaven, prostrates himself before another god on another's earth, gives thanks to another god over another's bread, and does works in the name of almsgiving and love for the sake of another god out of another's goods. Who is this god, so good that man becomes bad through him, so gracious that he makes another god — his own master, indeed — angry with him?