Against Marcion 2.5–2.14

From here, then, on to all the questions — you dogs, whom the apostle drives outside, barking at the God of truth. These are the bones of argument you gnaw: “If God is good, and foreknows the future, and has power to avert evil, why did he allow man — his own image and likeness, indeed his own substance, by the origin of the soul — to fall away from obedience to the law into death, circumvented by the devil? For if he were good, and so unwilling that such a thing should happen, and foreknowing, and so not ignorant that it would happen, and powerful, and so able to prevent it, what could not happen under these three conditions of divine majesty would in no way have happened. But if it did happen, the contrary is settled: God is to be believed neither good nor foreknowing nor powerful. For in so far as nothing of the kind would have happened if God were such — that is, good, foreknowing, and powerful — to that extent it happened because God is not such.”

To this we must first defend in the Creator the attributes that are called into doubt: I mean goodness, foreknowledge, and power. And I shall not linger on this point, since Christ himself goes before us with the rule that proof is to be undertaken from works. The Creator's works testify to both his goodness, in that they are good, as we have shown, and his power, in that they are so great, and made moreover out of nothing. For even if they were made out of some matter, as some will have it, even so they were made out of nothing, since they were not what they are. In short, they are great in this way, by being good; and God is powerful in this way, in that all things are his — which is why he is called almighty. And what shall I say of his foreknowledge, which has as many witnesses as it has made prophets? Yet what need is there to claim foreknowledge for the author of all things, who surely foreknew all things by arranging them and arranged them by foreknowing them? Certainly he foreknew the transgression itself; had he not foreknown it, he would not have enjoined caution against it under fear of death.

If, then, these faculties were in God, on account of which no evil either could or should have befallen man, and it nevertheless befell him, let us look also at man's condition, to see whether it happened rather through it, since it could not have happened through God. I find that man was established by God free, master of his own choice and his own power; and I observe no image and likeness of God in him more than the form of such a state. For it is not by his face and bodily features, so varied in the human race, that he was modelled on the God who is uniform; but in that substance which he drew from God himself, that is, the soul, answering to the form of God, he was stamped with the freedom and power of his own choice. This state of his was confirmed by the very law that God then laid down. For a law would not be laid down for one who did not have in his power the obedience due to the law; nor again would the threat of death be attached to transgression, if contempt of the law were not also reckoned to man as lying within the freedom of his choice. So too you will find in the Creator's later laws, as he sets before man good and evil, life and death. Nor would the whole order of discipline have been arranged through precepts, with God calling, threatening, and exhorting, except for man, free and willing both to obey and to despise.

But since it is already understood from this that we are building up man's free power of choice for this purpose — that what befell him should be laid at his own door and not at God's — lest you too object at this point that he ought not to have been so made, if the freedom and power of choice were going to prove fatal, I shall first defend this too: that he ought to have been so made; so that I may the more strongly commend both that he was so made and that he was made in a manner worthy of God, by showing the higher cause that led to his being made so. God's goodness and his reason will support this arrangement too, being in agreement in everything with our God. For neither is reason reason without goodness, nor goodness goodness without reason — except perhaps with Marcion's god, who is irrationally good, as we have shown. It was necessary that God be known: this surely is good and rational. It was necessary that there be something worthy to know God: what could be provided so worthy as the image and likeness of God? This too is without doubt good and rational. It was necessary, then, that the image and likeness of God be established with free choice and power of its own, so that this very thing — the freedom and power of choice — might be reckoned the image and likeness of God in it. To this end that substance was fitted to man which would be of this state: the breath of God, which is surely free and in its own power. And besides, how could it be that man, possessing the whole world, should not reign first of all in the possession of his own mind — lord of others, slave of himself?

You may recognize, then, God's goodness from his condescension and his reason from his arrangement. Let goodness alone now be credited with bestowing so much on man — that is, freedom of choice; let reason claim for itself the other part — the manner of establishing it. For God alone is good by nature. For he who has what he is without beginning has it not by being established but by nature. But man, who exists wholly by being established and who has a beginning, received with his beginning the form in which he was to exist; and so he was disposed to good not by nature but by establishment, not having it as his own to be good, since he was disposed to good not by nature but by establishment, according to the good one who established him, namely the maker of good things. So that man might then have the good as his own, emancipated to him by God, and that the good might become man's property and in a way his nature, there was assigned to him at his establishment — as a kind of scale-holder at the emancipation of the good from God — freedom and power of choice. This would cause the good to be performed by man spontaneously, as now his own, since the reason of goodness also required this: that it be exercised voluntarily, that is, out of freedom of choice, not favouring its establishment, not serving it. So man would at last be established as good if he were found good according to his establishment indeed, but now by his own will, as though by a property of nature; and likewise so that against evil too — for God certainly foresaw that as well — man might hold out the stronger, being free and in his own power. For if he lacked this right, so that he did even good not by will but by necessity, he would also be open to seizure by evil through the weakness of servitude, a slave to evil just as to good. So complete freedom of choice in both directions was granted him, so that as master of himself he might steadily meet both, freely keeping the good and freely avoiding the evil; since in any case it was necessary that man, placed under God's judgment, should make that judgment just by the merits of his own choice — a free choice, that is. Otherwise neither the reward of good nor that of evil could justly be weighed out to one who had been found good or evil by necessity and not by will. For this purpose the law too was established, not excluding but proving freedom, through obedience freely rendered or transgression freely committed. So freedom of choice lay open to either outcome.

If, then, both God's goodness and his reason are found in the freedom of choice granted to man, we must not set aside the first definition of goodness and reason, which must be established before any discussion, and prejudge from what happened afterwards that God ought not to have made man so, because things turned out otherwise than befitted God. Rather, having discerned that he ought to have made him so, we must examine the rest with that discernment kept intact. It is easy, however, for those who stumble at once at man's fall, before they have looked into his condition, to charge the author with what happened, because they have not examined the author's reason either. In short, God's goodness, observed from the beginning of his works, will persuade us that no evil could have come from God; and man's freedom, when reconsidered, will show that it is itself guilty of what it committed.

By this definition everything is kept safe for God: the nature of his goodness, the reason of his arrangement, and the fullness of his foreknowledge and power. You ought, however, to require of God also the utmost steadfastness and pre-eminent faithfulness in every arrangement he makes, so that you stop asking whether anything could have happened against God's will. For if you hold fast to God's steadfastness and faithfulness, which must be upheld by his good and rational arrangements, you will not be surprised either that God did not intervene against what he did not want to happen, in order to preserve what he did want. For if he had once granted man freedom and power of choice, and granted them worthily, as we have shown, he had surely granted them to be enjoyed, by the very authority of the arrangement — to be enjoyed, as far as it rested with him, according to himself, that is, according to God, that is, toward good (for who will allow anything against himself?); but as far as it rested with man, according to the movements of his own freedom (for who, having once granted someone the enjoyment of a thing, does not grant him to enjoy it according to his own mind and choice?). It followed, then, that God should stand back from the freedom he had once granted man — that is, keep within himself both his foreknowledge and his superior power, through which he could have intervened to prevent man, setting out to use his freedom badly, from falling into danger. For if he had intervened, he would have rescinded the freedom of choice that he had granted in reason and goodness.

In short, suppose he had intervened; suppose he had rescinded the freedom of choice, calling man back from the tree and keeping the cheating serpent itself from meeting the woman: would not Marcion exclaim, “O futile, unstable, faithless lord, rescinding what he has established! Why had he granted free choice, if he intervenes? Why does he intervene, if he granted it?” Let him choose where to brand himself with error: in the establishing or in the rescinding. Would he not then have seemed the more deceived through lack of foreknowledge of the future, if he had stood in the way? And who would not have said that he had granted it as though not knowing how it would turn out? But even if he foreknew that man would use what he had been given badly, what is so worthy of God as steadfastness, as faithfulness to his arrangements, whatever they are? It was for man to see to it, if he did not rightly discharge what he had rightly received. He himself would be guilty before the law he refused to obey — not God. Or should the lawgiver himself cheat his own law by not allowing what it prescribed to be fulfilled? These speeches, which you would most fittingly have made against the Creator if he had obstructed man's free will out of the providence and power you demand, now whisper to yourself on the Creator's behalf: that he showed steadfastness and faithfulness in his arrangements, as being both rational and good.

For he had brought man forward only as far as living, not as far as living rightly — with regard, that is, to God and his law. So he himself had granted him to live, making him a living soul; but living rightly he had laid upon him as a charge, admonishing him to obey the law. Thus he who even now desires man restored to life, preferring the sinner's repentance to his death, proves that man was not established for death. As, then, God brought upon man a state of life, so man drew upon himself a state of death — and this not through weakness, any more than through ignorance, so that nothing might be imputed to the author. For although it was an angel who seduced him, yet the one seduced was free and in his own power; although it was an angel, yet the image and likeness of God was stronger than an angel; although it was an angel, yet the breath of God was nobler than the material spirit of which the angels consist — “who makes,” it says, “his angels spirits and his attendants a flame of fire” — since he would not have subjected the universe to man if man were too weak to rule it and not superior to the angels, to whom he subjected nothing of the kind. So neither would he have laid the weight of the law — if the law is heavy — on one too weak to bear it, nor have confronted with the sentence of death one whom he knew to be excusable on the ground of weakness. Finally, he would have made him weak not by the freedom and power of choice but rather by the lack of them. And indeed the same man, the same substance of soul, the same state as Adam's, the same freedom and power of choice makes a man victor today over the same devil, when it is exercised in obedience to the laws of God.

“Yet in any case,” you say, “the Creator's substance is found capable of sin, since the breath of God, that is, the soul, sinned in man, and the corruption of the portion cannot but be referred back to the original whole.” To answer this we must explain the nature of the soul. First of all we must hold to what the Greek Scripture marked in calling it “breath,” not “spirit.” For some who translate from the Greek, not reflecting on the difference or caring about the proper meaning of words, put “spirit” for “breath,” and so give the heretics occasion to stain the Spirit of God with sin, that is, God himself. And the question has already been seized upon. Understand, then, that breath is less than spirit, a little breeze from it, as it were; and though it comes from the spirit, it is not spirit. For a breeze too is thinner than wind, and though the breeze comes from the wind, it is not wind. One may even call the breath the image of the spirit. For this is why man is the image of God, that is, of spirit — for God is spirit. The breath, then, is the image of the spirit. Further, an image will not be equal to the reality in every respect. For it is one thing to be according to the reality, another to be the reality itself. So the breath too, being the image of the spirit, cannot so match the image of God that, because the reality — that is, the spirit, that is, God — is without sin, therefore the image — that is, the breath, that is, man — could not have committed sin. In this the image will be less than the reality and the breath inferior to the spirit: it has indeed those lineaments of God, in that it is immortal, free and master of its own choice, often foreknowing, rational, capable of understanding and knowledge; yet even in these it is an image and does not reach to the very power of divinity; and so neither does it reach to perfect freedom from sin, for this belongs to God alone, that is, to the reality, and this alone is not allowed to the image. For just as an image, though it expresses all the lineaments of the reality, yet lacks its very power, having no motion, so the soul, the image of the spirit, could not express its power alone, that is, the happiness of not sinning. Otherwise it would not be soul but spirit, and he who received a soul would not be man but God.

And besides, not everything that is God's will be held to be God, so that you should demand that his breath too be God, that is, free from sin, because it is God's breath. Nor would you, if you blew into a flute, make the flute a man, though you blew from your own soul — as God too blew from his own spirit. In short, since Scripture plainly says that God breathed into man's face and man became a living soul, not a life-giving spirit, it separated the soul from the condition of its maker. For the work must necessarily be other than the craftsman, that is, inferior to the craftsman. A pitcher made by a potter will not itself be a potter; so neither will the breath made by the spirit therefore be spirit. The very fact that the breath has been called soul — see whether it has not passed even from the condition of breath into some lesser quality. “So,” you say, “you have given the soul the weakness you denied above.” Clearly, when you require it to be equal to God, that is, immune from sin, I say it is weak; but when it is compared with an angel, I must defend it as stronger — the lord of the universe, whom angels now serve, who will even judge angels, if it stands firm in God's law, which at the beginning it refused to do. This very thing, then, the breath of God could commit: it could, but it ought not. It was able to, through the thinness of its substance, as being breath, not spirit; it was bound not to, through the power of choice, as being free, not a slave; and there was the further warning against sinning under threat of death, by which the thinness of its substance might be propped up and the freedom of its decision guided. So the soul cannot now be seen to have sinned through what it has akin to God, that is, through the breath, but through what was added to its substance, that is, free choice — granted indeed by God with reason, but driven by man wherever he wished. If this is so, God's whole arrangement is cleared of the reproach of evil. For freedom of choice will cast its fault back not on the one by whom it was given but on the one by whom it was not managed as it should have been. What evil, in short, will you charge to the Creator? If man's sin — what is man's will not be God's, nor is he to be held the author of sin who is found to be its forbidder, indeed its condemner. If death is an evil, death too will bring odium not on the one who threatened it but on the one who despised it, as its author. For by despising it he made it — and it would surely not have come about had he not despised.

But suppose you transfer the indictment of evil from man to the devil, as the instigator of sin, so as to direct the blame in this way too at the Creator as the devil's author — “who makes his angels spirits.” Then what was made by God, that is, an angel, will belong to him who made it; but what was not made by God, that is, the devil — that is, the accuser — it remains that he made himself, by bringing an accusation against God, and a false one: first, that God had forbidden them to eat of every tree; then, as though they would not die if they ate; third, as though God had grudged them divinity. Where, then, did the malice of lying and deceiving men and of slandering God come from? Certainly not from God, who established this angel too as good, after the pattern of his good works. Indeed he is proclaimed the wisest of all before he became the devil — unless wisdom is an evil. And if you unroll the prophecy of Ezekiel, you will easily see that that angel was both good by his establishment and corrupted of his own accord. For in the person of the prince of Tyre it is said of the devil: “And the word of the Lord came to me, saying: Son of man, take up a lament over the prince of Tyre, and say: Thus says the Lord: You are the seal of the likeness” — he, that is, who broke the seal on the integrity of the image and likeness — “a crown of beauty” — this as to the most eminent of angels, an archangel, the wisest of all — “in the delights of the paradise of your God you were born” — for it was there that God had made the angels, in the second formation of the shapes of living creatures — “you were clothed with the finest stone: sardius, topaz, emerald, carbuncle, sapphire, jasper, ligure, agate, amethyst, chrysolite, beryl, onyx; and you filled your storehouses and your treasuries with gold. From the day you were created, when I set you with the cherub on the holy mountain of God, you were in the midst of the stones of fire. You were blameless in your days, from the day you were created, until your wounds were found; from the abundance of your trading you filled your storerooms, and you sinned,” and so on.

These words plainly belong to the rebuke of the angel, not properly to that prince; for no human being was born in the paradise of God, not even Adam himself, who was rather moved there; nor was any man set with the cherub on the holy mountain of God, that is, in the heavenly heights, from which the Lord too testifies that Satan fell; nor did he dwell among the stones of fire, among the jewelled rays of the burning stars, from which Satan was cast down like lightning. It was the very author of sin who was being pointed out in the person of a sinful man: once blameless from the day of his creation, created by God for good, as by the good creator of blameless creatures, adorned with all angelic glory and placed with God, the good with the good; but afterwards turned by himself to evil. “From the time,” it says, “your wounds appeared” — imputing to him, of course, those wounds with which he wounded man and led him away from obedience to God. And he sinned from the time he sowed sin, and so thereafter carried on the abundance of his trading, that is, of his malice — the tally of sins, namely — he too having been established, as a spirit, with free choice no less. For God would have ordered nothing close to himself without freedom of this kind. Yet by condemning him beforehand God testified that he had gone off course from the form of his establishment through the lust of a malice conceived of his own accord; and by measuring out a period of leave for his operations he carried out the reason of his goodness, postponing the devil's destruction by the same counsel as man's restoration. For he gave room for a contest, so that man, by the same freedom of choice by which he had fallen to the enemy, might crush him, proving that the fault was his own and not God's, and so might worthily recover salvation through victory; and that the devil might be punished more bitterly, defeated by the one he had crushed before; and that God might be found so much the more good, waiting for man to return more glorious to paradise, now from life, with leave to pluck the tree of life.

So until man's sin God was from the beginning only good; from then on a judge, and severe, and — as the Marcionites will have it — cruel. At once the woman is condemned to give birth in pain and to serve her husband — she who before had heard, without any sorrow, by way of blessing, of the increase of the race: “Only increase and multiply”; she who had been destined to be a helper to the man, not his servant. At once the earth too is cursed — but before it was blessed. At once thistles and thorns — but before grass and herbs and fruitful trees. At once sweat and toil for bread — but before, food from every tree free of labour and nourishment without care. From then on man is bound for the earth — but before he was taken from the earth; from then on for death — but before for life; from then on in garments of skin — but before naked without shame. So God's goodness came first, according to his nature; his severity afterwards, according to the cause. The one is inborn, the other incidental; the one his own, the other adapted; the one put forth, the other applied. For neither ought his nature to have kept his goodness idle, nor ought the cause to have let his severity slip by in silence. The one God displayed for his own sake, the other for the occasion.

Now go on and accuse the judge's state too, as akin to evil — you who dreamed up another god, only good, because you cannot bear a judge; although we have shown that he too is either a judge or, if not a judge, then certainly the perverse and empty founder of a discipline that is not enforced, that is, not judged. But you who reject God as judge, without proving him not to be a judge, will surely have to accuse justice itself, which makes the judge, or else count it among the kinds of malice — that is, list injustice among the titles of goodness. For justice is evil only if injustice is good. Further, when you are compelled to declare injustice among the worst things, you are pressed by the same yoke to reckon justice among the best. For nothing that is the rival of evil is not good, just as nothing that is the rival of good is not evil. So as much as injustice is evil, so much is justice good. And it must be reckoned not merely a kind of goodness but its safeguard; for goodness, unless it is governed by justice so as to be just, will not be goodness, if it is unjust. For nothing unjust is good, and everything just is good.

So if the fellowship and harmony of goodness and justice cannot admit their separation, with what face will you set up the difference of two gods by separating them, reckoning a good god on one side and a just god on the other? Where the good is, there the just stands too. From the beginning, in short, the Creator was just as much as he was good; both went forth together. His goodness wrought the world; his justice regulated it — justice which, even when it judged that the world should be made of good things, judged with the counsel of goodness. It is the work of justice that a separation was pronounced between light and darkness, between day and night, between heaven and earth, between the upper and the lower water, between the gathering of the sea and the mass of dry land, between the greater and the lesser lights, those of day and of night, between male and female, between the tree of knowledge and the tree of life, between the world and paradise, between the animals born of water and those born of earth. As goodness conceived all things, so justice distinguished them. All of this was arranged and ordered by judgment. Every position, condition, effect, motion, state, rising, and setting of each of the elements is a judgment of the Creator — so that you should not think he is to be defined as judge only from the time evil began, and so darken justice with the cause of evil. For in these ways we have shown that justice came forth together with goodness, the author of all things, so that it too is to be reckoned inborn in God and natural, not incidental, since it has been found in the Lord as the arbiter of his works.

But when evil afterwards broke out, and from then on God's goodness began to deal with an adversary, that same justice of God took on another task as well: to direct goodness now in view of the opposition. So, setting aside the freedom by which God is good even unasked, goodness is weighed out according to each one's merits: offered to the worthy, refused to the unworthy, taken away from the ungrateful, and likewise avenged against all its rivals. So this whole work of justice is a management of goodness: in that it condemns by judging, punishes by condemning, and, as you put it, rages, it serves good, surely, not evil. In short, the fear of judgment contributes to good, not to evil. For it was not enough for the good to be commended by itself, now that it was labouring under an adversary. For even if it was commendable by itself, it was not also preservable, being now open to attack by the adversary, unless some power of fear presided, to compel even the unwilling to seek and guard the good. Otherwise, with so many allurements of evil attacking the good, who would seek what he could despise with impunity? Who would guard what he could lose without danger? You have read that the way of evil is broad and far more crowded: would not all slide into it, if nothing were feared on it? We shudder at the Creator's terrible threats, and even so are scarcely torn away from evil. What if he threatened nothing?

Will you call this justice evil, which does not favour evil? Will you deny that it is good, when it provides for the good? What sort of god would you want? What sort would suit the wicked? Under whom would sins rejoice? Whom would the devil mock? Would you judge that god good who could make man worse by making sin safe? Who is the author of good, except one who also requires it? Likewise, who is a stranger to evil, except one who is also its enemy? Who is its enemy, except one who also fights it? Who fights it, except one who also punishes it? So God is wholly good, since he is everything on behalf of the good. So, in short, he is almighty, because he is powerful both to help and to harm. Merely to do good is less, because such a one can do nothing but do good. With what confidence should I hope for good from such a one, if this is all he can do? How should I pursue the reward of innocence, if I do not also keep in view the penalty of guilt? I must distrust him, lest he who was not able to do both should reward neither side. So far is justice the very fullness of divinity, displaying God as perfect, both Father and Lord: Father in clemency, Lord in discipline; Father in gentle power, Lord in severe; Father to be loved dutifully, Lord to be feared necessarily; to be loved because he prefers mercy to sacrifice, to be feared because he does not want sin; to be loved because he prefers the sinner's repentance to his death, to be feared because he does not want sinners who still do not repent. Therefore the law lays down both: “You shall love God,” and “You shall fear God.” The one it set before the obedient, the other before the one who strays.

At every point the same God meets you: striking but also healing, killing but also making alive, humbling but also exalting, creating evils but also making peace — so that here too I may answer the heretics. “See,” they say, “he himself professes to be the creator of evils, when he says: I am he who creates evils.” Seizing on a word that is shared, which by its ambiguity confuses two kinds of evils — since both sins and punishments are called evils — they want him to be understood indiscriminately as the creator of evils, so that he may be declared the author of malice as well. We, however, drawing a distinction between the two forms, and separating the evils of sin from the evils of punishment, the evils of fault from the evils of penalty, assign to each part its own author: of the evils of sin and fault, the devil; of the evils of punishment and penalty, God the Creator; so that the former part is credited to malice and the latter to justice — the justice of a judgment that creates evils against the evils of sin. It is of these evils, then, that the Creator professes to be the author, the evils that befit a judge. They are indeed evils to those on whom they are repaid; but in their own right they are good, as being just, defending the good, and hostile to sins, and in this order worthy of God. Or else prove them unjust, so that you may prove they are to be credited to malice, that is, that they are evils of injustice; for if they belong to justice, they will no longer be evils but goods — evils only to the wicked, by whom even goods are condemned outright as evils.

Establish, then, that it was unjust that man, the willful despiser of the divine law, received in return what he had not wanted to do without; unjust that the malice of that age was struck down by rains, and later by fires; unjust that Egypt, most foul and superstitious, and moreover the oppressor of a people who were its guests, was struck with a tenfold chastisement. He hardens Pharaoh's heart — but the man had deserved to be delivered to destruction, who had already denied God, who had already so often proudly rebuffed his envoys, who had already added to the people's burden of labour; and finally, as an Egyptian, he had long been guilty before God of heathen idolatry, worshipping the ibis and the crocodile sooner than the living God. He gave up even his own people — but they were ungrateful. He sent bears against the boys too — but they were irreverent toward the prophet. The impudence of an age that owed modesty had to be punished.