Against Marcion 1.24–2.4

But God, as he is eternal and rational, is also, I think, perfect in all things: “For you shall be perfect, as your Father who is in heaven.” Show that his goodness too is perfect — though it is sufficiently established that it is imperfect, since it is found to be neither natural nor rational. Now it will be exposed in another way as well: no longer merely imperfect but deficient, scanty and exhausted, since it falls short of the number of its objects and is not shown to all. For not all are saved, but fewer than all the Creator's Jews and Christians. And since more perish, how can a goodness be defended as perfect which is idle for the greater part — something for a few, nothing for the many, yielding to perdition, a partner in destruction? If more are not saved, then it will be not goodness but malice that is the more perfect. For as it is the work of goodness to save, so it is the work of malice not to save. And indeed, not saving while it saves a few, it will be more perfect in not helping than in helping. You cannot turn back on the Creator the failure of goodness toward all; for the one you hold to be a judge you show must be understood as a dispenser of goodness, if you like, not a lavisher of it, as you claim yours to be. So much do you prefer your god to the Creator on the ground of this goodness alone. If he professes this alone and wholly, it ought to have been lacking to no one.

But I do not now wish to convict Marcion's god of imperfect goodness from the greater number of those who perish: it is enough that the very ones whom he saves, being found to have an imperfect salvation, show his goodness imperfect — saved, that is, as far as the soul, lost in the flesh, which with him does not rise again. Where does this halving of salvation come from, if not from a failure of goodness? What would have befitted perfect goodness more than to bring the whole man back to salvation — the whole man condemned by the Creator, the whole man chosen by the supremely good god? As far as I know, with him too it is the flesh that is baptized, the flesh that is taken away from marriage, the flesh that is butchered for confessing the name. And even if sins are imputed to the flesh, the soul's guilt comes first, and the leadership in fault is to be ascribed rather to the soul, which the flesh attends in the role of servant. In short, flesh without a soul does not sin at all. So in this too his goodness is unjust and thereby imperfect, abandoning to destruction the more innocent substance, which offends by obedience, not by choice. Though his Christ did not put on its reality, as your heresy has decided, he nevertheless deigned to take on its likeness; the very fact that he feigned it shows that he owed it something. And what is man but flesh, since it was the bodily material, not the soul, that received the name of man from its author? “And God made man,” it says, “clay from the earth” — not soul, for the soul came from the breath — “and man became a living soul.” Who? Surely the one made of clay. “And God placed man in paradise”: what he formed, not what he breathed; he who is now flesh, not he who is soul.

If this is so, with what face will you claim the title of perfect goodness for one whose goodness has failed not merely in a particular part of the man to be freed but in what belongs to him as a whole? If that is full grace and solid mercy which saves the soul alone, this present life gives more, which we enjoy whole and entire. Besides, to rise in part will be to be penalized, not freed. This too belonged to perfect goodness: that man, once freed into faith in the supremely good god, should at once be taken out of the dwelling and dominion of the fierce god. But as it is, O Marcionite, the pain of your flesh brings forth for you both little fevers and all the other thistles and thorns; and exposed not only to the Creator's thunderbolts, wars, plagues, and other blows but even to his scorpions, in what respect do you think yourself freed from his kingdom, when his flies still walk all over you? If you have been rescued for the future, why not from the present too, so as to be perfectly rescued? Our condition is different: we are with our author, our judge, the offended head of our race. You put forward only a good god; but you cannot show to be perfectly good one by whom you are not perfectly freed.

As regards the question of goodness, we have shown along these lines that it by no means befits God, being neither inborn nor rational nor perfect, but dishonest and unjust and unworthy of the very name of goodness; so that, in so far as it befits a god, it follows that he is no god who is preferred on the strength of such goodness — and not merely such goodness, but goodness alone. For now it is right to discuss this too: whether God is to be reckoned by goodness alone, the other attendant feelings and affections being denied — which the Marcionites drive away from their god onto the Creator. We, however, acknowledge them in the Creator as worthy of God, and on this ground too we shall deny that he is God in whom not everything worthy of God is found. If he aimed to entitle with the name of Christ some god of Epicurus's school — such that “what is blessed and incorruptible causes trouble neither to itself nor to another” (for Marcion, chewing over this maxim, removed from him all severity and judicial power) — he ought either to have conceived a god wholly unmoved and insensible (and then what has he to do with Christ, who was troublesome to the Jews by his teaching and to himself by his suffering?), or else to have acknowledged him in the other emotions too (and then what has he to do with Epicurus, who is of no use either to him or to Christians?).

For see: by the very fact that he who before was quiet, who meanwhile did not trouble to make himself known by any work, after so long an age has been moved for man's salvation — surely by an act of will — was he not then shaken by a new will, so that he appears subject to the other emotions as well? For what will is there without the spur of desire? And care too will attend will. For who will will something and desire it and not care about it? Since, then, he both willed and desired man's salvation, he has already made trouble both for himself and for others, against the wishes of Epicurus, Marcion's counsellor. For he has also set up an adversary for himself: that very thing against which he willed, desired, and cared — whether sin or death — and above all their arbiter and man's lord, the Creator. Moreover, nothing will proceed without rivalry that does not proceed without an adversary. In short, in willing, desiring, and caring to set man free, he is by that very fact already a rival both of the one from whom he frees him — freeing him, of course, for himself against him — and of the things from which he frees him, freeing him for other things. So rivalry must be attended by its officers against what it rivals: anger, discord, hatred, disdain, indignation, bile, ill will, offence. If all these attend rivalry, and rivalry works to free man, and the freeing of man is the work of goodness, that goodness cannot exist without its endowments — that is, without the feelings and affections through which it is carried on against the Creator — lest in this way too it be ruled irrational, if it lacks the feelings and affections that are its due. These things we shall defend much more fully in the Creator's case, where they are also made a reproach against him.

But here it is enough to show that the god is most perverse in the very proclamation of his solitary goodness, for which they refuse to ascribe to him such movements of mind as they censure in the Creator. For if he neither rivals nor is angry nor condemns nor afflicts, since he does not even act as judge, I do not see how any system of moral rules can hold for him — and a fuller one at that. For how can it be that he lays down precepts he will not enforce, forbids sins he will not punish, because he will not judge, being a stranger, of course, to all feelings of severity and punishment? Why does he forbid the doing of what he does not avenge when done, when it would have been much more right not to forbid what he was not going to avenge than not to avenge what he had forbidden? Indeed he ought to have permitted it outright, since he would forbid without cause, not meaning to avenge. For even now what is forbidden without punishment is tacitly permitted. And surely he forbids the doing only of what he does not like to be done. He is utterly stupid, then, who is not offended by the doing of what he does not like to be done, since offence is the companion of frustrated will. Or if he is offended, he must be angry; if he is angry, he must avenge. For vengeance is the fruit of anger, anger the due of offence, and offence, as I said, the companion of frustrated will. But he does not avenge; therefore neither is he offended; if he is not offended, then neither is his will injured when what he did not will to be done is done; and sin is then done in accordance with his will, since what does not injure the will is not done against the will.

Or if it is to be the part of divine virtue or goodness to be unwilling that a thing be done and to forbid it, yet not to be moved if it is done, we reply that he was already moved who was unwilling, and that it is idle for him not to be moved at the deed who was moved against its being done, when he did not will that it be done; for by being unwilling he forbade it. And did he not also judge, in being unwilling that it be done and therefore forbidding it? For he judged that it should not be done, and by forbidding he pronounced it. So he too already judges. If it is unworthy of God to judge — or if it is worthy of God to judge only so far as merely to be unwilling and to forbid, not also to avenge what is done — yet nothing is so unworthy of God as not to carry out what he was unwilling and forbade to be done. First, because he owes to any sentence and law of his a sanction, for its authority and to make obedience necessary. Second, because what he was unwilling to have done, and by being unwilling forbade, must be the rival of the good; and it is more unworthy of God to spare evil than to punish it — above all for the supremely good God, who is not plainly good in any other way than as the rival of evil, so that he exercises his love of good by hatred of evil and fulfils his protection of good by overthrowing evil.

“But he plainly judges evil by being unwilling, and condemns it by forbidding; he lets it go, however, by not avenging, and acquits it by not punishing.” O god, betrayer of truth, cheat of his own sentence! He is afraid to condemn what he condemns, afraid to hate what he does not love; he allows to be done what he does not allow to be done; he prefers to show what he does not want rather than to prove it. This will be an imaginary goodness, a discipline that is itself a phantom, perfunctory precepts, carefree sins. Hear, you sinners — and you who are not yet such, so that you may become so: a better god has been found, who is neither offended nor angry nor avenges; for whom no fire is cooked up in Gehenna, for whom no gnashing of teeth shudders in the outer darkness: he is only good. In short, he forbids sinning — but only in writing. It is up to you whether you choose to put your signature to obedience to him, so that you may seem to have paid honour to God; for he does not want fear. And so the Marcionites openly profess that they do not fear their god at all. “For a bad god,” they say, “will be feared, but a good one loved.” Fool, do you say that one whom you call Lord is not to be feared, when this is a name of power, and of power to be feared? And how will you love unless you fear not to love? Plainly he is neither your father, to whom both love for dutiful affection and fear for his power are due, nor your lawful master, so that you love him for his kindness and fear him for his discipline. It is kidnappers who are loved like that, and not feared as well. For only a just and regular dominion will be feared; an adulterous one can be loved, since it rests on seduction, not authority, on flattery, not power. And what is more flattering than not to punish sins?

Come then, you who do not fear God because he is good: why do you not boil over into every lust — the highest fruit of life, as far as I know, for all who do not fear God? Why do you not frequent the solemn pleasures of the raving circus, the savage arena, and the lascivious stage? Why, in persecutions too, when the incense box is held out, do you not at once gain your life by denial? “Far be it,” you say, “far be it!” Then you already fear sin, and by fearing it you have proved that he is feared who forbids sin. Unless, by the same perversity as your god's, you keep what you do not fear, just as he forbids what he does not avenge. It is still more foolish when, asked what will become of every sinner on that day, they answer that he will be cast away. Cast away where? If out of sight, is not this too done by a judgment? For he is judged fit to be cast away — and surely by a judgment of condemnation; unless the sinner is cast away for salvation, so that this too may suit the supremely good god! And what will being cast away be, but losing what he would have obtained if he had not been cast away — that is, salvation? So he will be cast away to the loss of salvation; and this cannot be decreed except by one who is angry and offended and punishes sin — that is, by a judge.

And what is the end of that castaway? “He will be seized,” they say, “by the Creator's fire.” Has their god, then, no element provided even for this purpose, by which he might banish his sinners, even without cruelty, rather than hand them over to the Creator? And what will the Creator do then? I suppose he will prepare them a Gehenna with extra sulphur, as for his blasphemers — unless perhaps, being a jealous God, he spares those who desert his adversary. O god perverse at every point, everywhere irrational, empty in everything, and so no one at all! I see neither his state nor his condition nor his nature nor any order in him hold together — no, not even the very sacrament of his faith. For to what purpose does he too require baptism? If it is the remission of sins, how will he be seen to remit sins who is not seen to retain them? For if he retained them, he would judge. If it is release from death, how will he release from death who did not bind to death? For he would have condemned, if he had bound from the beginning. If it is man's regeneration, how does he regenerate who did not generate? For doing again does not suit one by whom a thing was not done even once. If it is the obtaining of the Holy Spirit, how will he grant the Spirit who did not first give the soul? For the Spirit is in a sense the complement of the soul. So he seals a man who has never been unsealed with him, washes a man who has never been defiled with him; and into this whole sacrament of salvation he plunges flesh that has no share in salvation? Not even a farmer will water land that will yield no fruit — unless he is as foolish as Marcion's god. Accordingly, when he lays on the weakest or most unworthy flesh so great a holiness, whether as burden or as glory, why does he either burden it when it is weak or adorn it when it is unworthy? Why does he not reward with salvation what he burdens or adorns? Why does he cheat it of the wages of its work, not repaying the flesh with salvation? Why does he even let the honour of holiness die in it?

And what shall I say of the emptiness of his discipline, by which he sanctifies a substance that is holy already? With him the flesh is not baptized unless it is a virgin, a widow, or celibate, or has purchased baptism by divorce — as though even eunuchs were not born of marriage. Without doubt this rule will rest on the condemnation of marriage. Let us see whether it is just — not as though we meant to destroy the happiness of holiness, like certain Nicolaitans, champions of lust and luxury, but as those who know holiness without condemning marriage, and pursue it and prefer it, not as good over evil but as better over good. For we do not throw marriage away but lay it aside; we do not prescribe holiness but advise it, keeping both the good and the better, each pursuing them as he has strength; and we defend marriage openly only when it is attacked with hostility as filth, so as to destroy the Creator, who blessed marriage, as befits the honourable thing it is, for the increase of the human race, just as he blessed the whole of creation for sound and good uses. Foods will not be condemned because, sought out too elaborately, they give people over to gluttony; nor will clothes be accused because, bought too expensively, they swell into vanity. So neither will the things of marriage be spat upon because, poured out too intemperately, they flare into lust. There is a great difference between cause and fault, between a state and its excess. So it is not the institution of such things that must be rejected but their going off course, according to the judgment of their very institutor, who said both “Increase and multiply” and “You shall not commit adultery” and “You shall not covet your neighbour's wife,” and who punishes with death both incest and the sacrilegious and monstrous madness of lust toward males and toward beasts.

And even if a limit is now set to marrying — which among us, indeed, a spiritual reason defends on the authority of the Paraclete, prescribing one marriage in the faith — it will belong to the same one to fix the limit who once let it spread; he will gather who scattered; he will cut down the forest who planted it; he will reap the crop who sowed it; he will say, “It remains that those who have wives be as though they had none,” who also said long ago, “Increase and multiply”: the end belongs to him to whom the beginning also belonged. Yet the forest is not cut down as deserving blame, nor the crop reaped as deserving condemnation, but as obedient to its season. So too the business of marriage admits the axe and sickle of holiness not as evil but as ripe to be finished, as kept in reserve for holiness itself, to which, by giving way, it would give being.

Hence I will now say that Marcion's god, when he rejects marriage as evil and a traffic in unchastity, acts against the very holiness he seems to favour. For he roots out its material: if there are no marriages, there is no holiness. The witness of abstinence is void when the freedom to do otherwise is taken away, since certain things are proved by their opposites. Just as power is made perfect in weakness, so abstinence from marrying is recognized where marrying is possible. Who, in short, will be called abstinent when that from which one must abstain is taken away? What temperance in eating is there in famine? What rejection of ambition in poverty? What bridling of lust in castration? And further, to check completely the sowing of the human race — I doubt whether this too befits the supremely good god. For how will he want man saved whom he forbids to be born, by taking away that by which he is born? How will he have anyone on whom to set the seal of his goodness, when he does not allow him to exist? How will he love one whose origin he does not love? Perhaps he fears an overflow of offspring, lest he should have to toil at freeing more, lest he should make many heretics, lest he should have Marcionites of nobler birth, born of Marcionites. Will not the harshness of Pharaoh, the killer of newborns, be more humane? For he takes lives away, this one does not give them; he removes from life, this one does not admit to life. As to homicide there is no difference between them: under both a human being is killed — under the one already born, under the other yet to be born. You would owe gratitude, O heretic god, if you existed, to the Creator's arrangement in uniting male and female; for surely your Marcion too was born of marriage.

Enough of this concerning Marcion's god, whom both the definitions of the one divinity and the conditions of its states confirm not to exist at all. But the course of the whole work will lead to this conclusion too. So if anyone thinks we have done too little, let him expect that it has been kept for its own time — as has the examination of the very Scriptures that Marcion uses.

The occasion for revising this work — what befell it I explained in the preface to the first little book — has also brought us this: that, in dealing with the two gods against Marcion, we give each its own title and volume according to the division of the material, defining the one as not existing at all and defending the other as worthily God, since it has pleased the man of Pontus to bring in the one and exclude the other. For he could not build his lie without demolishing the truth; he had to undermine one thing in order to build what he wanted. So builds the man who has no materials of his own. But the dispute ought to have concerned this alone: that the god who is set above the Creator is no one; so that, once the false god had been driven off by sure rules prescribing a divinity both unique and perfect, there would be no further question about the true God. As surely as it was established that he exists — and so too while it is not established that another exists — it would befit us to hold him without controversy, of whatever kind he is: to be adored rather than judged, to be won over rather than discussed. For what is more necessary for man than care for the true God, upon whom, so to speak, he had fallen, since there was no other god?

But as it is, the almighty God, the Lord and Founder of the universe, is put on trial — for this reason alone, I think: that he has been known from the beginning, that he has never lain hidden, that he has always shone forth, even before Romulus himself, let alone before Tiberius — except that he is unknown to the heretics alone, who put him on trial. They suppose that another god must be presumed for this reason: that they can more easily censure than deny the one who plainly exists, weighing God by the judgment of their own mind; just as if some blind man, or one with swimming eyes, wanted to presume another sun, milder and healthier, because he does not see the one he sees. There is one sun, O man, which tempers this world: even when you do not think so, it is excellent and useful; and when it seems to you harsher and more hostile, or even dirtier and more corrupting, it is still true to its own reason. If you cannot perceive that reason, you could not have borne the rays of any other sun either, had there been one — and surely a greater one. For if you are blind toward the lower god, what would you be toward the higher? Why not rather spare your weakness and not stretch yourself into danger, since you have a God certain and undoubted, and by this very fact sufficiently seen, once you have first perceived this: that he is one whom you do not know except in part, the part in which he himself willed to be known?

But you do not deny God, as though you knew him; you discuss him, as not knowing him; indeed you even accuse him, as though you knew him — whom, if you knew him, you would not accuse, nor even discuss. Giving him the name, you deny the substance of the name, that is, the greatness, not acknowledging it to be as great as it is; for if man could have known it in every respect, it would not be greatness. Isaiah himself, already then foreseeing heretical hearts, says: “Who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counsellor? Or with whom did he take counsel, or who showed him the way of understanding and knowledge?” And the apostle agrees with him: “O the depth of the riches and wisdom of God! How unsearchable are his judgments” — surely of God as judge — “and his ways past finding out” — surely the ways of understanding and knowledge, which no one showed him; unless perhaps these censors of divinity did, who say, “God ought not to have done so,” and “He ought rather to have done so” — as though anyone knew what is in God except the Spirit of God. But having the spirit of the world, not recognizing God through wisdom in the wisdom of God, they think themselves better counsellors than God; since, as the wisdom of the world is foolishness with God, so the wisdom of God is foolishness with the world. But we know that the foolishness of God is wiser than men and the weakness of God stronger than men. And so God is greatest when to man he is small, best when to man he is not good, most one when to man he is two or more.

But if from the beginning man, being natural and not receiving the things of the Spirit, thought God's law foolishness, so that he neglected to keep it, and therefore, having no faith, even what he seemed to have was taken from him — the grace of paradise and familiarity with God, through which he would have known all the things of God, had he obeyed — what wonder if, returned to his own material and banished to the workhouse of tilling the earth, bent and stooping toward the earth in that very labour, he passed on to his whole race the spirit of the world taken from it, a race natural, that is, and heretical, not receiving the things of God? Or who will hesitate to call that very sin of Adam a heresy, since he committed it by choosing his own opinion rather than God's? Except that Adam never said to his potter, “You have not shaped me wisely.” He confessed that he had been led astray; he did not hide the one who led him astray. He was a very raw heretic. He disobeyed, yet he did not blaspheme his Creator nor censure his author, whom from his own beginning he had found good and excellent, and whom he himself, if you like, had made his judge.

In entering, then, on the examination of the known God, if it is asked in what condition he is known, we must begin from his works, which are prior to man, so that his goodness — discovered at once along with him, and thereafter established and laid down — may suggest to us some sense of how to understand the way the subsequent ordering of things turned out. And Marcion's disciples, recognizing the goodness of our God, can also acknowledge it as worthy of God under the same headings under which we showed it unworthy in their god. First, this very point: the material for his being acknowledged he did not find in another's possession, but made for himself out of his own. The first goodness of the Creator, then, is that by which God did not will to lie hidden forever — that is, that there should be nothing by which God might be known. For what is so good as the knowledge and enjoyment of God? For even though it did not yet appear that this was good, since there was not yet anything to which it could appear, yet God foreknew what good would appear, and therefore entrusted it to his supreme goodness, as the agent of the good that was to appear — a goodness surely not sudden, nor of an accidental or provoked impulse, as though it were to be reckoned from the moment it began to work. For if it itself set the beginning from the moment it began to work, it had no beginning itself when it made the beginning. And once the beginning had been made by it, from it was born the reckoning of times as well, for distinguishing and marking which the stars and heavenly lights were set in order: “For they shall be,” it says, “for times and months and years.” So it had no time before time, since it made time, just as it had no beginning before the beginning, since it established the beginning. And so, lacking both the order of a beginning and the measure of time, it will be reckoned of an immeasurable and endless age, and cannot be thought sudden or accidental or provoked, having nothing from which to be so reckoned — that is, any kind of time. It must be presumed eternal, inborn in God and perpetual, and therefore worthy of God; and from this point it puts to shame the goodness of Marcion's god, which is later, I do not say than beginnings and times, but than the very malice of the Creator — if indeed malice could have been produced by goodness.

When, then, the goodness of God had provided man for knowing God, it added this too to its praise: that it first devised a dwelling for man, a very great structure, and afterwards a greater one, so that in a great dwelling, as in a lesser, he might practise and advance, and so be promoted from God's good, that is, the great, to his best, that is, the greater dwelling. For this good work it employs also the best of ministers, his Word: “My heart,” he says, “has poured forth the best word.” Let Marcion recognize from this the first best fruit — of the best tree, surely. The most ignorant of peasants has grafted a bad tree onto the good. But the shoot of blasphemy will not thrive; it will wither with its gardener, and so the nature of the good tree will bear witness to itself. Look, in sum, at what fruit the Word has borne: “And God said, Let it be, and it was made; and God saw that it was good” — not as though he did not know it was good until he saw it, but because it was good he looked on it, honouring, sealing, and approving the goodness of his works by the favour of his gaze. So too he blessed what he made well, so that the whole God might be commended to you, good both in speaking and in doing. The Word did not yet know how to speak ill, because it did not yet know how to do ill. We shall see the causes that required even this of God. Meanwhile the world consisted of good things only, showing plainly in advance how much good was being prepared for him for whom all this was being prepared.

Who, in short, was worthy to inhabit God's works but his own image and likeness? This too goodness wrought, and indeed more actively: not by a word of command but by a familiar hand, with even a coaxing word sent first: “Let us make man in our image and likeness.” Goodness spoke; goodness formed from clay so great a substance of flesh, built out of one material with so many qualities; goodness breathed into him a soul, not dead but living; goodness set him over all things, to enjoy and to rule them, even to name them; goodness went further and added delights for man, so that, though possessing the whole world, he might dwell in its pleasanter part, being moved into paradise — even then from the world into the church. The same goodness provided a helper too, so that nothing might be less than good: “For it is not good,” it says, “for the man to be alone.” It knew that the sex of Mary, and afterwards of the church, would be of benefit to him. And even the law which you blame, which you twist into controversies, goodness imposed, taking thought for man so that he might cleave to God and not seem so much free as cast off, placed on a level with his servants, the other animals, which are left loose by God and free out of disdain; but so that man alone might glory that he alone had been worthy to receive a law from God, and that, as a rational animal, capable of understanding and knowledge, he might be held within a rational freedom too, subject to him who had subjected all things to him. And goodness likewise added counsel for keeping this law: “On the day you eat, you shall die the death.” For most kindly it showed the outcome of transgression, lest ignorance of the danger should encourage neglect of obedience. Further, if there was reason for imposing the law, there followed also reason for keeping it, so that a penalty was attached to transgression — a penalty which he who foretold it nevertheless did not want to come about. Recognize, then, the goodness of our God, for the present at least up to this point, from his good works, his good blessings, his indulgences, his providences, and his good and kindly laws and warnings.