Against Marcion 5.6–5.9

So by all these things he shows of which God it is that he speaks the wisdom among the perfect: of him, namely, who took away the wisdom of the wise and brought to nothing the understanding of the prudent, who made foolish the wisdom of the world, choosing its foolish things and appointing them for salvation. This wisdom, he says, was hidden: it lay in things foolish and small and dishonourable, and it lay concealed also under figures, allegories, and riddles, to be revealed afterwards in Christ, who was set as a light of the nations by the Creator, who promised through the voice of Isaiah that he would open up treasures unseen and hidden. For that the god who did nothing at all in which he might be thought to have hidden something should have hidden anything is quite incredible. If he himself existed, he could not stay hidden, much less any mysteries of his. But the Creator is as well known himself as his mysteries are, which ran their course openly in Israel, yet were overshadowed as to their meanings, and in them the wisdom of God lay hidden: to be told among the perfect in its own time, but set forth in God's purpose before the ages. And whose are the ages, if not the Creator's? For if the ages are built of times, and times are put together from days and months and years, and days and months and years are marked by the Creator's suns and moons and stars, set by him for this purpose (“and they shall be,” he says, “for signs of months and years”), it is plain that the ages too are the Creator's, and that whatever is said to have been purposed before the ages belongs to no other than him whose the ages are. Or let Marcion prove that the ages belong to his god; let him also show the world itself in which ages may be reckoned, the vessel, so to speak, of the times, and some signs or instruments of them. If he shows nothing, I return to say this too: why did he purpose our glory before the Creator's ages? It might seem that he had purposed it before the ages if he had revealed it at the beginning of the age. But since he does so when almost the whole of the Creator's ages has already run out, he purposed it before the ages to no purpose, and not rather within the ages, since he was going to reveal it almost after the ages. For it does not belong to one who was slow in revealing to have been in a hurry in purposing. But both suit the Creator: to have purposed before the ages and to have revealed at the end of the ages, because what he both purposed and revealed he prepared in the intervening span of the ages in figures and riddles and allegories. But since he adds about our glory that none of the rulers of this age knew it, and that if they had known it they would never have crucified the Lord of glory, the heretic argues that the rulers of this age crucified the Lord …, that is, the Christ of the other god, so as to lay this too at the door of the Creator. Now, since we have shown above in what ways our glory is to be ascribed to the Creator, it must be taken as settled that the glory which was hidden with the Creator was rightly unknown also to all the Creator's virtues and powers, since not even servants may know their masters' plans, much less those apostate angels and the prince of transgression himself, the devil, whom I would contend were, because of their guilt, all the more strangers to any knowledge of the Creator's arrangements. But it no longer suits me either to take the rulers of this age as the Creator's virtues and powers, because the apostle ascribes ignorance to them. For even the devil, according to our Gospel too, recognized Jesus in the temptation; and according to the common document the evil spirit knew that he was the Holy One of God and was called Jesus and had come to destroy them. Also the parable of that strong armed man, whom another, stronger man overpowered and whose goods he seized, …: if in Marcion's reading it is taken of the Creator, then the Creator could no longer have been ignorant of the Lord of glory while he was being overpowered by him, nor could he have fixed on a cross the one against whom he had no strength. And it remains (credible enough on my view) that the Creator's virtues and powers, knowing the Lord of glory, their own Christ, crucified him, with that despair and overflowing malice with which even the most wicked slaves do not hesitate to kill their masters; for it is written in my Gospel that Satan entered into Judas. But according to Marcion, the apostle in this place does not allow ignorance of the Lord of glory to be ascribed to the Creator's powers, since he does not want them understood as the rulers of this age. And if he does not seem to have spoken of spiritual rulers, then he spoke of worldly ones: of the ruling people (not among the nations, of course), of its own rulers, of King Herod, and also of Pilate, and, above him, of the greater power of this age, the Roman authority that presided over them. So, when the arguments of the other side are torn down, our interpretations are built up. But you still want our glory to belong to your god and to have been hidden with him. Then why does both the god and the apostle still lean on the same document? What has he to do everywhere with the sayings of the prophets? “For who has known the mind of the Lord, and who has been his counsellor?” That is Isaiah's. What has he to do, too, with the examples of our God? For when he affirms that he is a wise master builder, we find this meant by the Creator through Isaiah of one who would lay out the divine rule of life: “For I will take away from Judaea,” he says, among other things, “the wise master builder.” And was it not Paul himself who was then marked out, destined to be taken away from Judaea, that is, from Judaism, for the building of Christianity, to lay the one foundation, which is Christ? For of this too the Creator says through the same prophet: “Behold, I am laying in the foundations of Zion a precious stone, held in honour, and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.” Unless God was professing himself a builder of an earthly work, so as not to be pointing to his Christ, who was to be the foundation of those who believe in him. On this foundation, according as each builds on it doctrine worthy or unworthy, if his work is to be tested by fire, if his reward is to be paid out through fire, it is the Creator's doing, because through fire our superstructure is judged, the superstructure, of course, on his own foundation, that is, on his own Christ. “Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” If man (thing and work and image and likeness, flesh from the earth and soul from the breath) is the Creator's, then, if we are not the Creator's temple, Marcion's god dwells wholly in what belongs to another. “If anyone corrupts the temple of God, he will be corrupted,” by the God of the temple, of course. In threatening an avenger he has threatened the Creator. “Be fools, that you may be wise.” Why? “For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.” With which God? Even if the earlier arguments have settled nothing for us in favour of this sense, it is well that he confirms it here too: “For it is written, ‘He catches the wise in their wickedness,’ and again, ‘The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile.’” For on the whole we shall have laid it down that he could not have used any saying of that God whom he ought to be destroying, if he were not teaching in his service. “So,” he says, “let no one boast in man”: and this too is according to the Creator's rule of life: “Wretched is the man who puts his hope in man,” and, “It is better to trust in God than to trust in men”; and so too with boasting.

“And he himself will bring to light the hidden things of darkness”: through Christ, of course, since he promised Christ as a light of the nations and declared himself a lamp searching the reins and hearts. From him too will come praise to each one, from whom also comes the opposite of praise, as from a judge. “Surely,” you say, “here at least he means by ‘the world’ the God of the world, when he says, ‘We have become a spectacle to the world, both to angels and to men’; because if he had meant by ‘the world’ the men of the world, he would not have named men afterwards as well.” No: so that you should not argue in this way, the foresight of the Holy Spirit showed how he had said, “We have become a spectacle to the world”: namely, to the angels who minister to the world and to the men to whom they minister. No doubt a man of such constancy (not to say the Holy Spirit), writing especially to the children whom he had begotten in the gospel, was afraid to name the God of the world freely, when he could not have seemed to preach against him unless he did so openly! I do not argue that the man who had his father's wife displeased him on the basis of the Creator's law (the apostle may have been following the rule of a common and public religion); but when he condemns him to be handed over to Satan, he is the herald of a God who condemns. No matter how he said it, “for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord,” since he has passed judgment both on the destruction of the flesh and on the salvation of the spirit; and in ordering the evil to be removed from their midst, he has recalled a sentence very frequent with the Creator. “Purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, as you are unleavened.” So the unleavened loaves were figures of us with the Creator. “So too Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed.” Why is Christ the Passover, unless the Passover is a figure of Christ by the likeness of the blood of the saving lamb and of Christ? Why has he clothed us and Christ with images of the Creator's festivals, if they were not ours? And in turning us away from sexual immorality he makes plain the resurrection of the flesh. “The body,” he says, “is not for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body,” as the temple for God and God for the temple. Will the temple, then, perish for God, and God for the temple? But you see: “He who raised the Lord will also raise us.” He raised him in the body too, because the body is for the Lord and the Lord for the body. And it is well that he piles it up: “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?” What will the heretic say? That the members of Christ, which are no longer our own, will not rise? “For we have been bought at a great price.” At no price at all, surely, if Christ was a phantom and had no substance of body to pay out for our bodies. So Christ had something with which to redeem us; and if he redeemed these bodies at a great price, bodies into which sexual immorality must not be admitted, as being now members of Christ, not our own, he will surely keep safe for himself what he bought at a great price. How, then, shall we now glorify, how shall we bear God in a body that is to perish? Next he takes up marriage, which Marcion, more rigorous than the apostle, forbids. For the apostle, though he prefers the good of continence, still permits marriage both to be contracted and to be used, and urges that it be kept rather than dissolved. Clearly Christ forbids divorce, while Moses permits it. Marcion, who takes away all sexual union from the faithful (let his catechumens see to themselves), and orders divorce before marriage: whose sentence is he following, Moses' or Christ's? And yet the apostle, when he commands that a wife should not depart from her husband, or, if she departs, should remain unmarried or be reconciled to her husband, both permitted divorce, since he did not forbid it altogether, and confirmed marriage, since he first forbade it to be dissolved and, if it happened to be dissolved, wanted it restored. But what reasons does he give for continence? “Because the time is short.” I had thought it was because there was another god in Christ! And yet from him from whom comes the shortening of the time will also come what befits the shortening of the time. No one provides for another's time. You make your god a petty one, Marcion, if the Creator's time hems him in in any respect. Certainly, in prescribing that one must marry only in the Lord, so that no believer should contract marriage with a heathen, he upholds the Creator's law, which everywhere forbids marriages with foreigners. “But even if there are those who are called gods, whether in heaven or on earth”: it is plain how he said this, not as though they truly were gods, but because there are those who are called gods, though they are not. For he began with idols, being about to discuss things sacrificed to idols: “We know that an idol is nothing.” But even Marcion does not deny that the Creator is God. So the apostle cannot seem to have placed the Creator too among those who are called gods and yet are not, since, even if they had been, still for us there would be one God, the Father, “from whom are all things.” From whom are all things for us, if not from him to whom all things belong? And what are they? You have them in what came before: “All things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or things present or things to come.” So he makes the Creator the God of all things, from whom come the world and life and death, which cannot belong to another god. From him, then, among all things, comes Christ too. In teaching that each one ought to live by his own labour, he had given examples first of soldiers, shepherds, and farmers; but they lacked divine authority. So he sets against the ungrateful the law of the Creator, which he was destroying (for he had no such law of his own god): “You shall not muzzle the ox that treads out the grain,” he says, and adds: “Is it for oxen that the Lord cares? …even to oxen kind for the sake of men? For it was written for our sake,” he says. So he proved that the law is allegorical with reference to us, and that it pleads for those who live by the gospel; and for that reason that the preachers of the gospel belong to no other than him to whom the law belongs, which provided for them, since he says, “For it was written for our sake.” But he did not want to use the right the law gave, because he preferred to labour without pay. This he referred to his own glory, which he said no one would make void, not to the destruction of the law, which he proved another would use. But look: blind Marcion stumbles on the rock from which our fathers drank in the wilderness. For if that rock was Christ (the Creator's Christ, of course, whose people they were too), to what purpose does he interpret it as a figure of a foreign mystery? Was it not to teach this very thing, that the old things were figures pointing to Christ, who was to be recognized from them? For when he is about to run through the rest of the people's history, he says first: “Now these things were made examples for us.” Tell me: were examples made by the Creator for the men of another god, and an unknown one at that? Or does one god borrow examples from another, and from a rival at that? He frightens me about the very God from whom he is transferring my faith! Will his adversary make me better for him? Now, if I commit the same sins as the people did, am I to suffer the same things or not? If not the same, he sets before me to no purpose fears of what I shall not suffer. But from whom shall I suffer? If from the Creator, what sort of things is it his part to inflict? And how will it be that the jealous God punishes the sinner of his rival rather than, on the contrary, cherishing him? If from that god, well, he does not know how to punish. So this whole argument of the apostle has no ground at all unless it is in keeping with the Creator's rule of life. Finally, in his conclusion he answers his preface: “Now these things happened to them as they did, and were written to admonish us, upon whom the ends of the ages have come.” What a Creator, already foreknowing and admonishing Christians who belong to another! I pass over, if anywhere, things like those already dealt with; some I also dispatch briefly. A great argument for another god, the permission of all kinds of food against the law! As if we ourselves did not also confess that the burdens of the law have been set aside, but by the one who imposed them, who promised a renewal; and so he who took away foods has also given back what he granted from the beginning. But if there had been some other god, the destroyer of our God, he would have forbidden his own people nothing more than to live on the provisions of his adversary.

“The head of the man is Christ.” Which Christ? Is he not the man's author? For he used “head” to mean authority, and authority will belong to no one but the author. Of what man, then, is he the head? Surely of the one of whom he goes on to say: “For a man ought not to have his head veiled, since he is the image of God.” So if he is the image of the Creator (for the Creator, looking upon Christ, his Word, who was to become man, said, “Let us make man in our image and likeness”), how can I have another head, and not him whose image I am? For since I am the image of the Creator, there is no room in me for another head. And why should a woman have authority over her head? If it is because she was made from the man and for the man, according to the Creator's ordinance, then in this way too the apostle cared for the rule of life of that God from whose ordinance he explains the reasons for the rule. He adds also: “because of the angels.” Which angels, that is, whose? If the Creator's apostate angels, rightly, so that the face which caused them to stumble should bear some mark in a humble dress and a darkening of its beauty; but if because of the angels of the other god, what does he fear, when not even the Marcionites themselves desire women? We have often shown already that heresies are placed by the apostle among evils as an evil, and that those are to be understood as approved who flee heresies as an evil. Likewise we have already proved in the Gospel, from the sacrament of the bread and the cup, the reality of the Lord's body and blood against Marcion's phantom; and that every mention of judgment belongs to the Creator, as God the judge, has been treated in almost the whole work. Now about spiritual gifts. I say that these too were promised to Christ by the Creator …, under that prescription, most just I think, by which the bestowal of a thing is to be believed to belong to no one other than him whose promise of it has been proved. Isaiah declared: “A rod will come forth from the root of Jesse, and a flower will rise up from the rod, and the Spirit of God will rest upon him.” Then he lists its kinds: “the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and godliness; the spirit of the fear of God will fill him.” For in the figure of the flower he shows Christ, who was to arise from the rod that came from the root of Jesse, that is, from the virgin of the family of David, the son of Jesse; in which Christ the whole substance of the Spirit was to rest, not as though it would come to him afterwards, since he was always the Spirit of God, even before the flesh (so that you should not argue from this that the prophecy belongs to a Christ who, as a mere man, of David's descent alone, would later obtain the spirit of his God); but because from the time he had flowered in the flesh taken from the stock of David, every working of spiritual grace was to rest in him and to cease and come to an end, as far as the Jews were concerned. As the fact itself bears witness, nothing of the Creator's Spirit has breathed among them from then on, now that there has been taken away from Judaea the wise and prudent master builder and counsellor and prophet, so that this is the meaning of “the law and the prophets until John.” Hear now how he declared that the gifts would also come from Christ after he was received into heaven: “He ascended on high,” that is, into heaven; “he led captivity captive,” that is, death or human slavery; “he gave gifts to the sons of men,” that is, bounties, which we call charisms. Elegantly he says “to the sons of men,” not indiscriminately “to men,” showing us the sons of men, that is, of men in the true sense, the apostles. For, he says, “in the gospel I have begotten you,” and, “my children, with whom I am again in labour.” Now too that promise of the Spirit made through Joel has been fulfilled: “In the last times I will pour out of my Spirit on all flesh, and their sons and daughters will prophesy; and on my menservants and maidservants I will pour out of my Spirit.” And surely, if the Creator promised the grace of the Spirit for the last days, and Christ, the dispenser of spiritual gifts, appeared in the last days, as the apostle says, “But when the time was fulfilled, God sent his Son,” and again, “For the time is now short,” it is plain from the prediction of the last times too that this grace of the Spirit belongs to the Christ of the one who foretold it. Compare, finally, the kinds listed by the apostle and by Isaiah. “To one,” he says, “is given through the Spirit the word of wisdom”: at once Isaiah too set down the spirit of wisdom. “To another the word of knowledge”: this will be the word of understanding and counsel. “To another faith in the same Spirit”: this will be the spirit of godliness and of the fear of God. “To another the gift of healings, to another of mighty works”: this will be the spirit of might. “To another prophecy, to another the discerning of spirits, to another kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues”: this will be the spirit of knowledge. See how the apostle agrees with the prophet both in making the distribution of the one Spirit and in explaining its particular forms. I can say this: the very fact that he likened the unity of the various gifts to the frame of our body with its many and different members shows that the same one is Lord both of the human body and of the Holy Spirit; he who did not want the gifts to have rank against one another in the body of the Spirit, just as he did not set the members in rank against one another in the human body; he who also taught the apostle that love is to be put before all the gifts, by the chief commandment, which Christ too approved: “You shall love the Lord with all your heart and all your strength and all your soul, and your neighbour as yourself.” And if he recalls that it was written in the law that the Creator would speak in other tongues and with other lips, and by this recollection confirms the gift of tongues, here too he cannot seem to have confirmed another's gift by the Creator's prophecy. Likewise, in prescribing silence to women in the church, so that they should not speak merely for the sake of learning (for he has already shown that they too have the right to prophesy, since he puts a veil on the woman even when she prophesies), he takes from the law the authority for subjecting the woman, a law which, to say it once for all, he ought not to have known except to destroy it. But to leave spiritual gifts now, the facts themselves will have to prove which of us claims them rashly for his own God, and whether they can be set against our side, even if the Creator promised them to his own Christ, not yet revealed, as destined for the Jews alone, to have their workings in their own time, in his own Christ, and among his own people. Let Marcion then produce gifts of his god: some prophets, who have spoken, however, not from human sense but from the Spirit of God, who have both foretold things to come and laid bare the secrets of the heart; let him bring out some psalm, some vision, some prayer, provided it is spiritual, in ecstasy, that is, out of one's senses, if any interpretation of a tongue has come with it; let him prove to me also that a woman among them has prophesied, one of those holier great women of his. I will say: if all these things are more readily brought forward by me, and all of them agreeing with the rules and arrangements and disciplines of the Creator, then without doubt the Christ and the Spirit and the apostle will belong to my God. Whoever wants to demand my declaration has it.

Meanwhile the Marcionite will produce nothing of this kind, even to declare to whom the Christ not yet revealed rather belongs: as mine is to be awaited, who was foretold from the beginning, his is not to be, precisely because he was not foretold from the beginning. So we believe better in a Christ to come than the heretic does in any. We must first consider how certain people then denied the resurrection of the dead. Surely in the same way as now; since it is always the resurrection of the flesh that is denied. The soul, in fact, many of the wise, claiming it to be divine, promise will be kept safe, and the common people themselves honour the dead on the assumption by which they are confident that their souls remain. But bodies, it is plain, are destroyed either at once by fire or by wild beasts, or, even when most carefully buried, still by time. So if the apostle beats back those who deny the resurrection, he is surely defending against them what they denied, namely the resurrection of the flesh. There you have the answer in brief. The rest is now more than is needed. For the very phrase “the resurrection of the dead” requires us to uphold the proper meanings of the words “dead” and “resurrection.” Nothing is dead except what has lost the soul by whose power it lived. It is the body that loses the soul and by losing it becomes dead; so the word “dead” suits the body. Further, if the resurrection is of the dead, and the dead is nothing other than the body, the resurrection will be of the body. So too the word “resurrection” claims no other thing than what has fallen. For a thing can be said to “rise” which has not fallen at all, which has always lain before. But to “rise again” belongs only to what has fallen; for it is said to rise again by rising a second time, because it fell. For the syllable “re” always denotes repetition. So we say that the body falls to the earth through death, as the fact itself bears witness from God's law. For it was said to the body, “You are earth, and to earth you shall go.” So what is from earth will go to earth; that falls which will go to earth; that rises again which falls. “Since by a man came death, by a man also came the resurrection.” Here Christ's body too is shown to me in the word “man,” which consists of a body, as we have often taught. And if we are all made alive in Christ just as we are put to death in Adam, then since in Adam we are put to death in the body, so we must also be made alive in Christ in the body. Otherwise the comparison does not hold, if the making alive in Christ does not meet the putting to death in Adam in the same substance. But he has inserted something more about Christ, which is not to be passed over, for the sake of the present dispute. For the resurrection of the flesh will be all the more proved, the more I show that Christ belongs to that God with whom the resurrection of the flesh is believed. When he says, “For he must reign until he puts his enemies under his feet,” even from this he already proclaims an avenging God, and so the very one who promised this to Christ: “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies the footstool of your feet. The Lord will send forth the rod of your power from Zion, and you will rule in the midst of your enemies.” But I must show that those scriptures belong to my case which the Jews too try to take away from us. They say, in fact, that this psalm was sung of Hezekiah, because he sat at the right hand of the temple and God turned back and destroyed his enemies; and that therefore the rest too, “Before the morning star I begot you from the womb,” fits Hezekiah and Hezekiah's birth. We produce the Gospels (of whose trustworthiness we ought surely by now, in so great a work, to have convinced them to some extent), which declare that the Lord was born by night, so that this is “before the morning star”: both from the star, understood by the Magi, and from the testimony of the angel who announced by night to the shepherds that Christ had at that very moment been born, and from the place of the birth, for one comes to an inn for the night. Perhaps it was also done with a mystical meaning, that Christ was born by night, since he was to be the light of truth in the darkness of ignorance. And God would not have said “I begot you” except to a true son. For although he says of the whole people, “I have begotten sons,” he does not add “from the womb.” And why did he add “from the womb” (so pointlessly, as though anyone doubted that a man was born from the womb) unless because he wanted it to be understood more pointedly of Christ: “I begot you from the womb,” that is, from the womb alone, without the seed of a man, assigning to the flesh what is from the womb, and to the Spirit what is from himself? To this is added: “You are a priest for ever.” But Hezekiah was not a priest, nor for ever, even if he had been one. “According to the order of Melchizedek,” he says. What has Hezekiah to do with Melchizedek, priest of the Most High, and uncircumcised at that, who blessed the circumcised Abraham after receiving the offering of tithes? But the order of Melchizedek will fit Christ, since Christ, the proper and lawful high priest of God, the pontiff of the priesthood of the uncircumcised, then appointed among the nations, by whom he was rather to be received, will, when he comes at the last, deign to acknowledge the circumcision and the race of Abraham with acceptance and blessing. There is also another psalm that begins thus: “O God, give your judgment to the king,” that is, to Christ who is to reign, “and your righteousness to the king's son,” that is, to Christ's people; for his sons are those who are born again in him. But this psalm too is said to be sung of Solomon. Yet will not the things that fit Christ alone be able to teach that the rest too belongs not to Solomon but to Christ? “He will come down,” it says, “like rain upon a fleece, and like drops falling on the earth,” describing his gentle and imperceptible descent from heaven into flesh. But Solomon, even if he came down from somewhere, did not come down like rain, because not from heaven. But I will set out only the simpler points. “He will rule from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth”: this was given to Christ alone, whereas Solomon ruled over one small Judaea. “All kings will worship him”: whom will all worship, if not Christ? “And all nations will serve him”: whom will all serve, if not Christ? “May his name be for ever”: whose name is eternal, if not Christ's? “His name will endure before the sun”: for before the sun is the Word of God, that is, Christ. “And all the nations will be blessed in him”: in Solomon no nation is blessed, but in Christ every nation is. What now, if this psalm even shows him to be God? “And they will call him blessed; for blessed is the Lord God of Israel, who alone does wonders. Blessed is the name of his glory, and the whole earth will be filled with his glory.” Solomon, on the contrary, I dare say, lost even the glory he had in God, being drawn by a woman all the way into idolatry. And so, since in the middle of the psalm this too is set, “His enemies will lick the dust,” that is, when put under his feet, it will bear on the point for which I brought in this psalm and defended it for my case: to confirm that the one who, according to the Creator's arrangement, will obtain both the glory of the kingdom and the subjection of his enemies is to be believed to be none other than the Creator's Christ.