Against Marcion 2.24

So too you perversely interpret repentance in him, as though he repents out of fickleness or lack of foresight, or indeed from remembering a fault, because he said: “I repent that I made Saul king” — laying it down, of course, that repentance savours of confessing some bad deed or error. But not always. For the confession of repentance also occurs in regard to good deeds, to cast odium and reproach on one who has proved ungrateful for a kindness. So it was then declared by the Creator in order to load the blame on Saul personally. The Creator had not sinned when he took Saul into the kingship and enriched him with the Holy Spirit; for he had most worthily chosen one who was then the best — “such as there was not,” it says, “among the sons of Israel.” Nor had he failed to know that things would turn out so. For no one will put up with you ascribing lack of foresight to God, whom, since you do not deny him to be God, you confess to be also provident; for this is established as the very property of his divinity. But, as I said, he was loading Saul's evil deed by professing his own repentance; and since there was no fault in the choosing of Saul, it follows that this repentance is to be understood as reproachful rather than self-accusing.

“See,” you say, “I find it self-accusing in the case of the Ninevites, where the Scripture of Jonah says: And the Lord repented of the evil which he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it. As Jonah himself also says to God: This is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish, because I knew that you are merciful and compassionate, patient and abounding in mercy, repenting of evils.” Good, then, that he put first the title of the supremely good God: most patient, that is, toward the wicked, and most abundant in mercy and compassion toward those who acknowledge and bewail their sins, as the Ninevites then did. For if he who is such is supremely good, you will first have to concede this: that any concurrence with malice does not befit such a one, that is, the supremely good. And since Marcion too maintains that a good tree may not produce bad fruit either, and yet Scripture has named “evil” … which the supremely good does not admit, is there not some interpretation by which to understand those evils as being able to occur even in the supremely good? There is. We say, in short, that “evil” here signifies not what is to be referred to the Creator's nature, as though he were evil, but to his power, as judge; according to which he declared: “I am he who creates evils,” and “Behold, I send evils upon you” — not sinful evils but avenging ones. We have sufficiently washed away their ill repute, as befitting a judge. And just as these, though called evils, are not censured in a judge nor by their name show him to be an evil judge, so too this “evil” must now be understood, which, counted among those judicial evils, befits the judge together with them. For among the Greeks too “evils” are sometimes used for afflictions and injuries, not for malignities, as in this passage. And so, if the Creator repented of this evil as though of a creature of his own — something, that is, to be rejected and judged a fault — yet here too no criminal act will be charged to the Creator, who had worthily and deservedly decreed that a most wicked city be destroyed. So what he had justly purposed, he had purposed not maliciously but from justice, not from malice; but he named the punishment itself “evil,” from the evil and the deserving of the suffering itself.

“Then,” you will say, “if you excuse the evil under the name of justice, since he had justly purposed destruction for the Ninevites, even so he is to be blamed, since he repented of a justice that surely ought not to be repented of.” No, I say: God will not repent of justice either; and it remains now to recognize what God's repentance is. For if man repents mostly from remembering a sin, and sometimes from the ingratitude that met some good work, it does not follow that God does likewise. For in so far as God neither commits evil nor condemns good, so far there is no room with him for repenting of either good or evil. The same Scripture defines this for you too, when Samuel says to Saul: “The Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from your hand today and will give it to your neighbour, who is better than you; and Israel will be split in two; and he will not turn nor repent, for he is not as a man, that he should repent.” This definition, then, establishes throughout another form of divine repentance, which is not to be reckoned, like human repentance, as coming from lack of foresight or fickleness or from any condemnation of a good or bad work. What, then, will be the manner of divine repentance? It is already shining out, if you do not refer it to human conditions. For it will be understood as nothing else than a simple change of a previous sentence, which may be admitted without blame even in a man, much more in God, whose every sentence is free from fault. For in Greek too the word for repentance is formed not from the confession of a sin but from a change of mind, which in God, as we have shown, comes about according to the encounter of changing circumstances.