Against Marcion 1.29

And what shall I say of the emptiness of his discipline, by which he sanctifies a substance that is holy already? With him the flesh is not baptized unless it is a virgin, a widow, or celibate, or has purchased baptism by divorce — as though even eunuchs were not born of marriage. Without doubt this rule will rest on the condemnation of marriage. Let us see whether it is just — not as though we meant to destroy the happiness of holiness, like certain Nicolaitans, champions of lust and luxury, but as those who know holiness without condemning marriage, and pursue it and prefer it, not as good over evil but as better over good. For we do not throw marriage away but lay it aside; we do not prescribe holiness but advise it, keeping both the good and the better, each pursuing them as he has strength; and we defend marriage openly only when it is attacked with hostility as filth, so as to destroy the Creator, who blessed marriage, as befits the honourable thing it is, for the increase of the human race, just as he blessed the whole of creation for sound and good uses. Foods will not be condemned because, sought out too elaborately, they give people over to gluttony; nor will clothes be accused because, bought too expensively, they swell into vanity. So neither will the things of marriage be spat upon because, poured out too intemperately, they flare into lust. There is a great difference between cause and fault, between a state and its excess. So it is not the institution of such things that must be rejected but their going off course, according to the judgment of their very institutor, who said both “Increase and multiply” and “You shall not commit adultery” and “You shall not covet your neighbour's wife,” and who punishes with death both incest and the sacrilegious and monstrous madness of lust toward males and toward beasts.

And even if a limit is now set to marrying — which among us, indeed, a spiritual reason defends on the authority of the Paraclete, prescribing one marriage in the faith — it will belong to the same one to fix the limit who once let it spread; he will gather who scattered; he will cut down the forest who planted it; he will reap the crop who sowed it; he will say, “It remains that those who have wives be as though they had none,” who also said long ago, “Increase and multiply”: the end belongs to him to whom the beginning also belonged. Yet the forest is not cut down as deserving blame, nor the crop reaped as deserving condemnation, but as obedient to its season. So too the business of marriage admits the axe and sickle of holiness not as evil but as ripe to be finished, as kept in reserve for holiness itself, to which, by giving way, it would give being.

Hence I will now say that Marcion's god, when he rejects marriage as evil and a traffic in unchastity, acts against the very holiness he seems to favour. For he roots out its material: if there are no marriages, there is no holiness. The witness of abstinence is void when the freedom to do otherwise is taken away, since certain things are proved by their opposites. Just as power is made perfect in weakness, so abstinence from marrying is recognized where marrying is possible. Who, in short, will be called abstinent when that from which one must abstain is taken away? What temperance in eating is there in famine? What rejection of ambition in poverty? What bridling of lust in castration? And further, to check completely the sowing of the human race — I doubt whether this too befits the supremely good god. For how will he want man saved whom he forbids to be born, by taking away that by which he is born? How will he have anyone on whom to set the seal of his goodness, when he does not allow him to exist? How will he love one whose origin he does not love? Perhaps he fears an overflow of offspring, lest he should have to toil at freeing more, lest he should make many heretics, lest he should have Marcionites of nobler birth, born of Marcionites. Will not the harshness of Pharaoh, the killer of newborns, be more humane? For he takes lives away, this one does not give them; he removes from life, this one does not admit to life. As to homicide there is no difference between them: under both a human being is killed — under the one already born, under the other yet to be born. You would owe gratitude, O heretic god, if you existed, to the Creator's arrangement in uniting male and female; for surely your Marcion too was born of marriage.

Enough of this concerning Marcion's god, whom both the definitions of the one divinity and the conditions of its states confirm not to exist at all. But the course of the whole work will lead to this conclusion too. So if anyone thinks we have done too little, let him expect that it has been kept for its own time — as has the examination of the very Scriptures that Marcion uses.