Against Marcion 1.18

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.