Against Marcion 1.1–1.12

Whatever we have done against Marcion in the past, let it now be as it may. We are undertaking a new work out of an old one. My first little work, being somewhat hurried, I had afterwards withdrawn in favour of a fuller composition. This one too, before it had been furnished with copies, I lost through the fraud of a man who was then a brother and afterwards an apostate, who happened to have copied out certain parts most inaccurately and displayed them to the public. The need to correct it made a new version necessary, and the occasion persuaded me to add something. So this written work, the third after the second and now, from the third, the first, must of necessity explain at the outset how its work turned out, so that no one may be confused on finding its different versions scattered about.

Pontus, then, which is called Euxine (“hospitable”), is belied by its nature and mocked by its name. You should not judge Pontus hospitable from its situation either: it has withdrawn from our more civilized seas as though ashamed of its own barbarism. Most savage tribes inhabit it — if indeed one can be said to inhabit a wagon. Their dwelling is uncertain, their life raw, their lust promiscuous and for the most part naked; even when they hide it, they mark it by hanging their quivers from the yoke as a sign, so that no one may intrude. So they do not blush even at their own weapons. The corpses of their parents they cut up together with cattle and devour at a banquet. Those who have died in such a way that they are not fit for eating — theirs is an accursed death. Nor are the women softened toward modesty by their sex: they cut off their breasts, do their spinning with axes, and prefer soldiering to marrying. There is harshness from the sky as well. The day is never clear, the sun never smiles; the only air is fog; the whole year is winter; every wind that blows is the north wind. Liquids turn back into snow, rivers are denied by ice, mountains are heaped high with frost. Everything is numb, everything is stiff; nothing is warm there but savagery — that savagery, of course, which has given the stage its tales of the sacrifices of the Tauri, the loves of the Colchians, and the crosses of the Caucasus.

But nothing in Pontus is so barbarous and grim as the fact that Marcion was born there: more loathsome than a Scythian, more unsettled than a wagon-dweller, more inhuman than a Massagete, more audacious than an Amazon, darker than its cloud, colder than its winter, more brittle than its ice, more treacherous than the Danube, more precipitous than the Caucasus. And why not? At his hands the true Prometheus, God Almighty, is torn apart by blasphemies. Marcion is more savage even than the beasts of that barbarous land. For what beaver was ever such a castrator of the flesh as the man who abolished marriage? What Pontic mouse ever so gnawing as the man who gnawed away the Gospels? Truly, Euxine, you have brought forth a beast more acceptable to philosophers than to Christians. For that dog Diogenes, carrying a lamp around at noon, wanted to find a man; Marcion, having put out the light of his faith, lost the God he had found.

His disciples will not deny that his first faith was one with ours, his own letter being witness; so that from this point he can already be marked out as a heretic, since, deserting what he had been before, he afterwards chose for himself what had not been before. For a thing will be counted heresy to the extent that it is brought in later, just as that will be held to be truth which has been handed down from before and from the beginning. But another treatise will uphold this step against heretics, who are to be refuted even without discussing their doctrines: that they are such by the prescription of novelty. Now, since a real engagement must sometimes be allowed, lest the shortcut of prescription, if called upon everywhere, be put down to lack of confidence, I shall first set out my opponent's rule, so that no one may be unaware of the ground on which the principal question is to be fought.

The man of Pontus brings in two gods, like the two Clashing Rocks of his own shipwreck: the one whom he could not deny, that is, the Creator, that is, ours; and the one whom he will never be able to prove, that is, his own. The unhappy man took the impulse for this presumption from a simple saying of the Lord, who applied those examples of the good and the bad tree to human beings, not to gods: that the good tree does not bear bad fruit, nor the bad tree good fruit — that is, neither does a good mind or faith produce bad works, nor a bad one good works. For he was sick (as many are even now, and heretics above all) over the question of evil — where does evil come from? — and, his senses dulled by the very excess of his curiosity, he found the Creator declaring: “I am he who creates evils.” The more he presumed him to be the author of evil, on the strength of other arguments too, which persuade any perverse person in that way, the more he interpreted the Creator as the bad tree producing bad fruit, namely evils, and presumed that there must be another god, on the side of the good tree, with good fruit. And so, finding in Christ what seemed to be another arrangement, one of sole and pure kindness, as though different from the Creator's, he easily argued that a new and foreign divinity had been revealed in his Christ; and thereafter, with a little leaven, he soured the whole lump of the faith with heretical acid. He also had a certain Cerdo as instructor in this stumbling-block; the two of them, being blind, the more easily supposed they had seen two gods, for they had not seen the one whole. To the bleary-eyed even a single lamp is many. The one god, then, whom he was compelled to acknowledge, he destroyed by defaming him with evil; the other, whom he strove to invent, he built up by preferring him for goodness. On what articles he has arranged these natures we shall show in our replies themselves.

The principal contest, then, and hence the whole of it, concerns number: whether it is permissible to bring in two gods — by poetic and pictorial licence, if it comes to that, and now by a third kind, the heretical. But Christian truth has declared strictly: “God, if he is not one, is not,” because we more worthily believe that whatever is not as it ought to be does not exist. And so that you may know that God must be one, ask what God is, and you will find it no other way. As far as the human condition can define anything about God, I define what the conscience of all will also acknowledge: that God is the supreme great, established in eternity — for this state must be ascribed to eternity, which makes God the supreme great, since this is what eternity is in God — and so with the rest, so that God is the supreme great in form, in reason, in might, and in power. Since all agree on this — for no one will deny that God is something supremely great, except one who could declare, on the contrary, that God is something lowest and small, so as to deny God by taking away what is God's — what will then be the condition of the supreme great itself? Surely that nothing be equal to it, that is, that there be no other supreme great; because if there were, it would be equalled, and if it were equalled it would no longer be the supreme great, the condition and, so to speak, the law being overturned which allows nothing to be equal to the supreme great. Therefore the supreme great must be unique — which it will be by having no equal — or it will not be the supreme great. So it will exist in no other way than through that by which it has being, that is, by being altogether unique. Accordingly, since God is the supreme great, our truth has rightly declared: “God, if he is not one, is not” — not as though we doubted that God exists when we say “if not one, he is not,” but because we define the one whom we confidently hold to exist as being that which, if he is not, he is not God. Further, if the supreme great must be unique, then God will also be unique: not God except as the supreme great, not the supreme great except as having no equal, and not having no equal except by being unique. Certainly, whatever other god you introduce, you will not be able to maintain him as God in any other form than by ascribing to him too what is proper to divinity, both eternity and supreme greatness. How then will two supreme greats stand together, when this is what the supreme great is — to have no equal — and to have no equal belongs to one alone and can in no way exist in two?

But someone will argue that two supreme greats can indeed exist, distinct and separated within their own borders, and will doubtless cite the example of the kingdoms of the earth, so many in number and yet each supreme great in its own region; and he will think that human things may everywhere be compared with divine. Well, if room is given to this argument, what prevents the introduction — I do not say of a third and a fourth god — but of as many gods as there are kings of nations? It is God who is in question, and it is chiefly his property to admit comparison with no example. Nature itself will proclaim this, even if there were no Isaiah — or rather God himself through Isaiah: “To whom will you liken me?” Human things may perhaps be compared with divine things, but not so with God. For God is one thing, the things of God another. In short, you who use the example of a king as a supreme great, take care that you may no longer be able to use it. For a king, even though he is supreme great on his throne, next to God, is nevertheless below God; and when compared with God he will fall from being the supreme great, since that is transferred to God. If so, how do you use for comparison with God the example of a thing which is lost the moment it comes to comparison? And what if even among kings the supreme great cannot be seen in many places but is unique and singular — namely in him who, as king of kings, by the height of his greatness and the subjection of the other ranks, is held to be the summit of dominion? But even kings who preside singly, with undivided rule, over what I may call petty kingdoms — if they are brought together from every side for examination, to establish which of them excels in the resources and strength of his kingdom, the summit of greatness must necessarily be distilled into one, all the others being gradually squeezed out and excluded from the height of greatness by the outcome of the comparison. So then, although the supreme great seems to exist in many places while scattered, in its own strength, its own nature, and its own state it is unique. Accordingly, when two gods are compared as two supreme greats, the unity of the supreme great must yield to one of them by the verdict of the comparison; for the supreme consists in its victory, when another great one — not, however, supreme — has been overcome, and, possessing through the defeat of its rival a kind of solitude in the singularity of its pre-eminence, it is unique. This inescapable grip constrains the verdict to this: either it must be denied that God is the supreme great, which no wise man will allow, or that greatness must be shared with no other.

Or what reason has put together two supreme greats? For first I shall ask: why not more, if two? since the substance of divinity would have to be believed the richer if number were fitting for it. Valentinus was more honourable and more generous: having once dared to conceive two, Bythos and Sige, he then poured out a swarm of divinity, a litter of as many as thirty Aeons, like Aeneas's sow. Whatever reason does not allow several supreme greats to be admitted does not allow two either, since two are themselves several. After one comes number. A reason that could admit two could admit more as well; for two is already a multitude, once unity has been exceeded. In short, among us the force of that reason does not allow many gods to be believed, by the very limit by which that rule, establishing one God, does not allow two: namely, that God must be that to which nothing is equal, as the supreme great, and that that is unique to which nothing is equal. Now then, two supreme greats, two equals — for what worthwhile purpose, what advantage, would they be reckoned? What would number matter, when two equals do not differ from one? For what is the same in two is one thing. Even if there were more equals, they would all have been just as much one, differing in nothing among themselves inasmuch as they are equal. Further, if neither of the two differs from the other, since both are supreme greats inasmuch as both are gods, and neither surpasses the other, they show no reason for their number, having no pre-eminence; yet the number of divinity ought to rest on the highest reason, not least because its worship too would be thrown into doubt. For see: looking on two gods as equal as two supreme greats, what should I do? If I worshipped both, I should fear that the excess of duty might be thought superstition rather than religion, because two so equal, each containing both, I could win over in one, bearing witness by that very act to their equality and unity, as I venerated the one in the other, since in one there are two for me. If I worshipped one, I should equally reflect that I might seem to pour shame on the emptiness of a number made superfluous by having no difference. That is, I would judge it safer to worship neither than one with scruple, or both in vain.

So far we seem to have argued as though Marcion set up two equal gods. For while maintaining that God, the supreme great, must be believed unique, and excluding equality from him, we have treated them as two equals; nevertheless, by teaching that they cannot be equal according to the form of the supreme great, we have sufficiently established that there cannot be two. Otherwise, we know well that Marcion sets up unequal gods: the one a judge, fierce, mighty in war; the other gentle, mild, and simply good and supremely good. Let us examine this side too: whether difference at least can accommodate two, if equality could not. Here again the same rule of the supreme great will be our advocate, since it lays claim to the whole state of divinity. For, meeting my opponent and, as it were, laying hands on him to hold his view fast — since he does not deny that the Creator is God — I most justly plead in bar against him that there is no room for difference between those whom, having confessed them equally to be gods, he cannot make different. Not that even human beings may not be very different under the same name; but because nothing is to be called God, since nothing is to be believed God, except the supreme great. Since, then, he is compelled to acknowledge as the supreme great the one whom he does not deny to be God, it cannot be allowed that he should ascribe to the supreme great any diminution by which it would be made subject to another supreme great. For it ceases to be, if it is made subject. But it is not God's part to fall from his state, that is, from being the supreme great. For even in that more powerful god the supreme great could be endangered, if it can be depreciated in the Creator. So when two gods are declared to be two supreme greats, neither can be greater or less than the other, neither loftier or lower than the other. Deny that he is God whom you call inferior; deny that he is the supreme great whom you believe less. But if you have confessed both to be God, you have confessed two supreme greats. You will take nothing away from the one, nor add anything to the other. By acknowledging the divinity you have denied the difference.

Against this you will try to shake our treatment by way of the name of God, as a name loosely used and allowed to others as well, because it is written: “God has stood in the assembly of gods, and in their midst he will judge between gods,” and: “I said, You are gods.” Yet, you will say, the possession of the supreme great does not belong to these just because they are called gods; so neither does it belong to the Creator. I shall answer the fool — who has not reflected on this either — that the same argument might be turned back against Marcion's god: he too is called god, and yet is not thereby proved to be the supreme great, any more than the Creator's angels or men. If sharing names prejudges conditions, how many worthless slaves insult kings by bearing the names of Alexander and Darius and Holofernes! Yet the kings will not for that reason lose what they are. For even the idols of the nations are commonly called gods, but none is God by the fact that it is called god. So I defend the supreme great in the Creator not for the sake of the name of God, nor the sound or sign of that name, but for the very substance to which this name has fallen. Finding this alone unborn and unmade, alone eternal and the founder of the universe, I ascribe and claim the supreme great for it not because of its name but because of its state, not because of its title but because of its condition. And because the substance to which I ascribe it has already come to be called God, you think I am ascribing it to the name, since I must necessarily indicate by the name the substance to which I ascribe it — namely, that in which he consists who is called God. But the supreme great is reckoned from the substance, not from the name. Indeed Marcion too, claiming it for his god, claims it according to state, not according to vocabulary.

That supreme great, then, which we ascribe to God by the law of substance, not by the chance of a name, we contend must be present equally in two who consist of that substance which is called God; because in so far as they are called gods — that is, supreme greats, being of a substance rightly called unborn and eternal and therefore great and supreme — to that extent one supreme great cannot be held less or lower than another supreme great. If the happiness, loftiness, and integrity of the supreme great will stand firm in Marcion's god, it will stand equally in ours; if not in ours, then not in Marcion's either. Therefore the two supreme greats will be neither equal, because the rule of the supreme great already laid down forbids it, not tolerating comparison; nor unequal, because another rule of the supreme great confronts us, not admitting diminution. You are stuck, Marcion, in the middle of the surge of your own Pontus. The waves of truth engulf you on both sides. You can set up gods neither equal nor unequal, for there are not two. As far as the treatment of number properly goes — although the whole matter is fought over the two gods — we have meanwhile enclosed him within these lines, within which we shall now engage on the particular properties.

First, the Marcionites build their stupor on a lofty brow, because they bring forward a new god, as though we were ashamed of the old one. Children too are puffed up by new shoes; but, shod by the old tutor, they will soon be beaten for their vain glory. So I hear of a new god — in the old world, in the old age, and under the old God unknown and unheard of — a god whom, through so many ages past known to no one and ancient only in his very obscurity, a certain Jesus Christ (himself new under old names) has revealed, and no one else before him. I thank them for this boast, since with its great help I shall now prove the heresy — that is, the profession of a new divinity. This is the novelty that has produced gods for the heathen too, by a new and ever new title of consecration for each. What new god is there except a false one? Not even Saturn will his great antiquity prove a god today, since novelty too brought him forth once, when it first consecrated him. But living and genuine divinity is reckoned neither by novelty nor by antiquity but by its own truth. Eternity has no time, for it is itself all time. What it makes, it cannot undergo. That which may not be born is without age. God, if he is old, will not be; if he is new, was not. Novelty testifies to a beginning; age threatens an end. But God is as foreign to beginning and end as he is to time, the arbiter and measurer of beginning and end.

I know, of course, in what sense they boast of a new god: in respect of his being acknowledged. But I wished to strike back at the very novelty of the knowledge that strikes untrained souls, and at the natural charm of novelty itself, and so to go on from here to challenge them about an unknown god. For in setting him up as new by acknowledgment, they show that before acknowledgment he was unknown. Come, then, back to the lines and to your position! Persuade me that God could have been unknown. I do indeed find altars set out to unknown gods, but that is Attic idolatry; likewise to uncertain gods, but that is Roman superstition. Further, uncertain gods are less known, as being less certain, and so unknown, in so far as they are less certain. Which of the two titles shall we carve for Marcion's god? Both, I think: uncertain now and unknown before. For just as the known God, the Creator, made him unknown, so the certain God made him uncertain. But I will not wander so far as to say: if God was unknown and hidden, some region of hiding-places overshadowed him, itself also new and unknown, and likewise still uncertain now — certainly some immense region, and undoubtedly greater than the one it hid. Rather I shall propose briefly and pursue most fully the plea that God neither could have been unknown by reason of his greatness nor ought to have been by reason of his goodness, especially being superior to our Creator in both.

But since I notice that in certain matters the proof of every new and formerly unknown god must be referred to the pattern of the Creator, I must first show that we do this with reason, so that I may the more firmly rely on the support of a reason once set out. Before all else, how can it be that you, who acknowledge the Creator as God and confess that he was known first, should not realize that the other must be examined by you by the same methods by which you have already learned, in the first case, to know God? Everything earlier has set the norm for what is later. Two gods are now proposed, an unknown and a known. About the known there is no question: it is agreed that he exists, for he would not have been known unless he existed. About the unknown the dispute presses: for he may even not exist, since if he existed he would have been known. What is sought, then, is uncertain as long as it is unknown; and as long as it is sought it may also not exist, as long as it is uncertain. You have a God who is certain, as known, and one who is uncertain, as unknown. If so, do you not think it can be defended with just reason that uncertain things be proved by the norm, form, and rule of certain things? Otherwise, if in this cause, itself still uncertain, arguments are also drawn from uncertain things, a chain of questions will be tangled up from the discussion of those arguments, equally uncertain, which put faith at risk through uncertainty; and one will go on into those endless questions which the apostle does not love. But if the certain, undoubted, and settled parts of the rule are used, they will prejudge the uncertain, doubtful, and unsettled ones. Clearly, where a difference of state is found, uncertain things perhaps need not be referred to the form of certain ones, being released from any further appeal to comparison by the difference in their principal state. But when two gods are proposed, their principal state is common to them. For in being God, both are: unborn, unmade, eternal. This will be the principal state; the rest Marcion must see to, if he has arranged them in difference. For the later points are not under discussion — indeed they will not even be admitted — if the principal state is agreed. And it is agreed, since both are gods. And so those whose state is agreed to be common, when under it they are called to proof, if they are uncertain, must be referred to the form of those certain ones with whom they are reckoned to share the principal state, so that they may accordingly share in the manner of proof as well. Hence I shall draw the line most firmly: he is not God who is uncertain today because he was unknown before, since of one who is agreed to exist it would be agreed on this very ground that he was never unknown,

since from the beginning of things their Maker was discovered along with them, and they were brought forth for this very purpose, that God might be known. For even if Moses, somewhat later, seems to have been the first to dedicate the God of the world in the temple of his writings, the birth of acknowledgment will not for that reason be reckoned from the Pentateuch; for the whole of Moses' pen does not institute knowledge of the Creator but narrates it from the beginning, to be traced from paradise and Adam, not from Egypt and Moses. Indeed, the greater part of the human race, who have not even heard the name of Moses, let alone his writings, nevertheless know the God of Moses. Even while idolatry overshadows them with so great a dominion, they still speak of him apart, as though by a proper name, as “God,” and “God of gods,” and “if God grant,” and “what pleases God,” and “I commend it to God.” See whether they know him whom they testify to be able to do all things. Nor do they owe this to any books of Moses. The soul came before prophecy. For the consciousness of God is the soul's dowry from the beginning, the same and no other in Egyptians, in Syrians, and in the people of Pontus. Do not, barbarous heretic, make Abraham earlier than the world. Even if the Creator had been the God of one family, he would still not have been later than yours: he was known even to the people of Pontus before him. Let yours, then, take his pattern from his predecessor, the uncertain from the certain, the unknown from the known. Never will God be hidden, never will God be lacking; he will always be understood, always heard, even seen, in the way he wills. God has witnesses: all this that we are and in which we are. Thus he is proved both God and one, in that he is not unknown, while the other still labours to be proved.

“And rightly so,” they say; “for who is not better known to his own than to strangers?” No one. I seize on this saying too. For how can anything be foreign to God? To him nothing would be foreign, if he were anyone at all — for this belongs to God, that all things are his and all things belong to him — or else he would at once hear from us: “What then has he to do with strangers?” He will hear this more fully in its place. For now it is enough that no one is proved whose work is not proved. For just as the Creator is on this ground both God and undoubted God, that all things are his and nothing is foreign to him, so the other is on this ground not God, that all things are not his and are therefore foreign to him. In short, if the universe is the Creator's, I do not even see room for another god. All things are full and occupied by their Author. If any space in creation is empty for any divinity, clearly it will be empty for a false one. Truth is plain to be seen before falsehood. Why does not so great a host of idols make room somewhere for Marcion's god?

So I demand this also after the pattern of the Creator: that his god ought to have been known from the works of some world, some man, some age of his own; since even the error of the world has presumed to be gods, for this very reason, those whom it sometimes admits to have been men, because something seems to have been provided by each for the needs and comforts of life. So this too, after the pattern of God, has been believed divine: to establish or show something fitting and necessary for human affairs. Since, then, authority was lent to false divinity from the same source from which it had first come to the true, Marcion's god ought to have produced at least one little chickpea of his own, so that he might be proclaimed some new Triptolemus. Or else show a reason worthy of God why he created nothing, if he exists; for he would have created, if he had existed — by that same prejudgment by which it is plain that our God exists for no other reason than that he created all this. For the prescription will stand once for all: they cannot both confess the Creator to be God and fail to prove the one whom they wish to be equally believed God by the pattern of him whom they and everyone acknowledge as God; so that, since no one doubts the Creator to be God for this very reason — that he created all this — for this very reason no one ought to believe that he too is God who created nothing, unless perhaps some reason is offered.

That reason must be one of two: either he did not will to create anything, or he could not. There is no third. But not to have been able is unworthy of God. Whether not to have willed is worthy, I wish to inquire. Tell me, Marcion: did your god will to be known at some time or not? With what other purpose did he come down and preach and suffer and rise again, than that he might be known? Without doubt, if he was known, he willed it; for nothing would be done concerning him unless he had willed it. He, then, who took such pains to make himself known that he was displayed in the disgrace of flesh — and a greater disgrace if the flesh was false, for it is the more shameful if he also lied about the substance of his body — who even took upon himself the Creator's curse, hanging on a tree: how much more honourably he would have prepared the way for knowledge of himself by some signs of his own workmanship! — especially since he had to be made known against one by whom he had not been known from the beginning through works. For how can it be that the Creator, not knowing (as the Marcionites will have it) that there was another god above him, and asserting even on oath that he alone existed, armed the knowledge of himself with such great works, though, presuming himself unique, he need not have taken such care; while that loftier one, knowing that the inferior god was so equipped, provided himself with no means of being acknowledged? — when he ought to have created works even more distinguished and splendid, so that, like the Creator, he might be known as God from his works, and from nobler works as more powerful and more noble than the Creator.

Moreover, even if we could admit that he exists, we should have to argue that he exists without cause. For he would be without cause who had no work, since every work is the cause of there being someone whose work it is. Further, inasmuch as nothing ought to exist without cause — because if it is without cause, it is just as if it did not exist — to that extent I will more worthily believe that God does not exist than that he exists without cause. For he is without cause who, having no work, has no cause. But God ought not to exist without cause, that is, without work. So whenever I show that he exists without cause, as though he existed, I establish this: that he does not exist, because if he had existed, he would certainly not have been without cause. In the same way I say that he seeks faith from man without cause — faith which is accustomed otherwise to believe in God as shaped by the authority of his works — because he has provided nothing of the kind through which man has learned God. For even if very many believe in him, they do not therefore believe with reason, having no pledge of God, namely works worthy of God. And so on this account of idleness and lack of works he is close to both impudence and malice: impudence, in that he seeks a faith not owed to him, having provided nothing to prepare it; malice, in that he has made many guilty of unbelief by providing nothing for faith.