Against Marcion 1.13

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?