Against Marcion 2.15–2.25

First, then, look at the judge's justice; if its reason is established, then his severity too, and the means by which his severity runs its course, will be credited to reason and justice. And not to linger over more, plead the causes as well, if you would condemn the sentences; excuse the sins, if you would reject the judgments. Do not censure the judge; convict him of being a bad judge. For even if he exacted the sins of the fathers from the sons, the hardness of the people had compelled such remedies, so that, looking out at least for their descendants, they might obey the divine law. For who does not care more for his children's welfare than for his own? And if the blessing of the fathers was destined for their seed too, without any merit of the seed as yet, why should not the guilt of the fathers overflow onto the sons as well, so that both grace and offence might run through the whole race? — saving what was later to be decreed: that they would no longer say that the fathers had eaten a sour grape and the sons' teeth were set on edge; that is, that the father would not bear the son's sin nor the son the father's, but each would be guilty of his own sin; so that, once the hardness of the people had been tamed by the hardness of the law, justice would then judge not the race but persons. And yet, if you accept the true Gospel, you will learn to whom the sentence of him who repays the fathers' sins on the sons applies: to those, namely, who were of their own accord to call this sentence down on themselves: “His blood be upon our heads and on our children's.” So God's providence decreed for man what it had already heard.

Severity, then, is good because it is just, if the judge is good, that is, just. Likewise the other things are good through which the good work of good severity runs its course, whether anger or jealousy, without cruelty. For all these are owed to severity, as severity is owed to justice. And so the things that belong to a judge cannot be made a reproach to the judge, since they too are without fault, as the judge is. For what if you were to say that there must be a physician, but were to accuse his instruments of cutting and burning and amputating and binding, when a physician cannot exist without the instruments of his art? No — accuse the one who cuts badly, amputates at the wrong time, burns rashly, and so censure his instruments too as bad servants. It is just the same when you admit God as judge but destroy those movements and feelings through which he judges.

We learn about God from the prophets and from Christ, not from the philosophers nor from Epicurus. We who believe that God even lived on earth and took on the humility of human condition for the sake of human salvation are far from the opinion of those who hold that God cares about nothing. It is from there that a definition of this kind has come to the heretics too: “If God is angry and jealous and lifted up and embittered, then he will also be corrupted, then he will also die.” Well, it belongs to Christians to believe even that God died, and yet that he lives for ages of ages. Most foolish are those who prejudge divine things from human, so that, because passions of this kind are held in man to belong to a corruptible condition, they suppose them to be of the same state in God as well. Distinguish the substances and assign them their own feelings, as different as the substances require, though they seem to share names. For we read of God's right hand and eyes and feet, and yet they will not for that reason be compared with human ones because they share a name. As great as the difference will be between the divine body and the human under the same names of members, so great will be the difference between the divine mind and the human, even under the same names of feelings — feelings which the corruptibility of human substance makes corruptible in man, just as the incorruptibility of divine substance makes them incorruptible in God.

You certainly confess the Creator to be God? “Certainly,” you say. How, then, do you suppose anything human in God, and not everything divine? The one you do not deny to be God you confess not to be human, since by confessing him God you have surely prejudged that he differs from every quality of human conditions. Further, since you equally acknowledge that man was breathed by God into a living soul, not God by man, it is quite perverse to set human things in God rather than divine things in man, and to clothe God with man's image rather than man with God's. And so this must be reckoned the image of God in man: that the human mind has the same movements and feelings as God, though not such as God has; for according to their substance both their state and their outcome differ. In short, the opposite feelings — I mean gentleness, patience, mercy, and their very mother, goodness — why do you presume them to be divine? And yet we do not possess them perfectly, because God alone is perfect. So too those other kinds — I mean anger and exasperation — we do not undergo with the same happiness, because God alone is happy, by the property of incorruptibility. He will be angry, but not …; he will be embittered, but not endangered; he will be moved, but not overthrown. He must employ all things for the sake of all things, as many feelings as there are causes: anger because of the wicked, bile because of the ungrateful, jealousy because of the proud, and whatever is to the disadvantage of the wicked; so also mercy because of those who go astray, patience because of those who do not yet look back, generosity because of the deserving, and whatever the good need. All these he undergoes in his own manner, in which it befits him to undergo them — he on whose account man undergoes the same things, equally in his own manner.

These points, thus examined, show that the whole order of God as judge is the worker — and, to put it more worthily, the protector — of that universal and supreme goodness which the Marcionites refuse to acknowledge in the same God, as though it were set apart from judicial feelings and pure in its own state: the God who rains on the good and the evil and makes his sun rise on the just and the unjust — which the other god does not do at all. For although Marcion dared to erase from the gospel this testimony of Christ to the Creator, the world itself is inscribed with it, and it is read by every conscience. And this very patience of the Creator will serve for Marcion's condemnation — that patience which waits for the sinner's repentance rather than his death and prefers mercy to sacrifice; which turned away the destruction already decreed for the Ninevites, granted Hezekiah a span of life for his tears, and restored his kingdom to the tyrant of Babylon when he had repented. I mean that mercy which granted to the people the son of Saul, who was to die because of a vow; which released David with pardon when he confessed his sins against the house of Uriah; and which restored Israel itself as often as it judged it, and cherished it again as often as it rebuked it. Do not, then, look only at the judge; turn also to the examples of the supremely good. As you note when he avenges, consider when he pardons; set his gentleness against his austerity. When you have found both in the Creator, you will find in him also that for which you believe in another god.

Come, finally, to an inspection of his teachings, disciplines, precepts, and counsels. Perhaps you will say that these are also laid down by human laws. But before all the Lycurguses and Solons came Moses and God. There is no later age that does not receive from the first beginnings. At any rate, my Creator did not learn from your god to prescribe: “You shall not kill, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, you shall not covet what is another's, honour father and mother,” and “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” To these principal counsels of innocence and chastity, of justice and piety, are added prescriptions of humanity as well: when every seventh year slaves are set free; when at the same season the land is left alone, making room for the needy; when even the ox that treads out the grain has the bonds of its mouth loosed, for the fruit of its present labour — so that humanity, practised first on animals, might more easily be taught to bring relief to men.

But what good things of the law should I defend rather than those which the heresy has been eager to shake? Such as the rule of retaliation, which demands eye for eye, tooth for tooth, and bruise for bruise. It does not savour of a licence to inflict injury in turn, but looks to restraining violence altogether. To a people most hard and unfaithful toward God it would have seemed a long wait, or even incredible, to expect vindication from God, which was later to be proclaimed through the prophet: “Vengeance is mine, and I will repay, says the Lord.” Meanwhile, therefore, the committing of injury was to be checked by fear of a requital that would meet it at once, and the licence to retaliate was to be a prohibition of provocation, so that wickedness might cease, made safe from itself: while the second blow is permitted, the first is deterred, and when the first is deterred, the second is not struck either — since in other respects too the fear of retaliation works more readily through a taste of the same suffering. Nothing is more bitter than to suffer the very thing you have done to others.

And if the law takes something away from food and declares unclean animals that were once blessed, understand the plan of exercising self-control, and recognize the reins put on that gluttony which, while eating the bread of angels, longed for the cucumbers and melons of the Egyptians. Recognize too that provision was made against gluttony's companions, lust and luxury, which generally cool when the belly is disciplined — for “the people ate and drank and rose up to play.” Likewise, so that the craving for money might also be quenched in part, where it pleads the necessity of food, the ambition for costly foods was taken away. Lastly, so that man might more easily be trained to fast for God, he was accustomed to few and unglamorous foods, so as not to go hungry for any of the more luxurious. The Creator is surely to be blamed for taking foods away from his own people rather than from the more ungrateful Marcionites! Nor let anyone blame the burdens of sacrifices and the fussy scrupulousness of rituals and offerings, as though God had desired such things for himself, when he so plainly cries out: “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?” and “Who has required these things from your hands?” Rather, let him perceive God's careful purpose, by which he wished to bind a people prone to idolatry and transgression to his own religion by duties of the kind in which the superstition of the world was carried on, so as to call them away from it — commanding that these things be done to himself, as though he desired them, lest they sin by doing them for images.

And in the very dealings of life and of human conduct, at home and abroad, down to the care of vessels, he made distinctions in every way, so that, as these legal disciplines met them everywhere, they might not for a single moment be free from regard for God. For what would make a man blessed more than this: “his will is in the law of the Lord, and in the law of the Lord he will meditate day and night”? This law was not promulgated by the hardness of its author but by the reason of supreme kindness, taming rather the hardness of the people and hewing into shape, by laborious duties, a faith still rough in obedience — to say nothing of the hidden meanings of the law, which is spiritual and prophetic and figurative in nearly all its matters. For the present it is enough that it simply bound man to God, so that no one ought to reject it but one who does not care to serve God. To aid this benefit — not burden — of the law, the same goodness of God also ordained the prophets, teaching things worthy of God: to remove wickedness from the soul, to learn to do good, to seek judgment, to judge for the orphan and do justice to the widow, to love inquiry, to shun contact with the wicked, to let the oppressed go free, to tear up unjust contracts, to break bread for the hungry, to bring the homeless into your house, if you see the naked to cover him, and not to despise the members of your own family; to keep the tongue from evil and the lips from speaking deceit; to turn from evil and do good; to seek peace and pursue it; to be angry and not sin, that is, not to persist in anger or rage; not to walk in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stand in the way of sinners, nor sit in the seat of the pestilent.

But where, then? “Behold how good and pleasant it is for brothers to dwell in unity,” meditating day and night in the law of the Lord, since it is good to trust in God rather than to trust in man, and to hope in God rather than to hope in man. For what reward has man with God? “And he will be like a tree planted by the channels of water, which will yield its fruit in its season, and its leaf will not fall, and whatever he does will prosper.” “But the innocent and pure in heart, who does not take the name of God in vain and does not swear deceitfully to his neighbour, he will receive a blessing from the Lord and mercy from God his saviour.” “For the eyes of the Lord are on those who fear him, who hope in his mercy, to deliver their souls from death” — surely eternal death — “and to nourish them in famine” — surely of eternal life. “Many are the afflictions of the righteous, and the Lord will deliver them out of them all.” “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.” “The Lord keeps all their bones; not one of them will be broken.” “The Lord will redeem the souls of his servants.” These few passages we have brought in from the great Scriptures of the Creator, and nothing, I think, is now lacking to the testimony of a supremely good God, which his precepts of goodness and his promises sufficiently seal.

But these cuttlefish — in figure of whom the law also refused that fishy creature as food — as soon as they feel themselves exposed, spew out the ink of blasphemy and so scatter each person's attention just when it is closing in, flaunting and asserting things that would darken the shining goodness of the Creator. But even through these mists we shall follow their wickedness and drag the devices of darkness into the light — devices which charge the Creator above all with that fraud and robbery of gold and silver which he commanded the Hebrews to commit against the Egyptians. Come, most unhappy heretic, I call on you yourself as arbiter: first hear the case on both sides, and then you will judge the author of the command. The Egyptians demand back from the Hebrews the vessels of gold and silver. The Hebrews in turn bring counter-claims, alleging that, in the name of the same fathers and on the evidence of the same document of Scripture, wages must be paid to them too for that servile labour: for bricks made, for cities and country houses built. What will you judge, you who have chosen the supremely good god? That the Hebrews must admit fraud, or the Egyptians compensation? For it is said that the case was argued in this way through envoys on both sides, the Egyptians demanding back the vessels and the Jews demanding back their labour. And the Egyptians, being in the wrong, gave up their claims; but today the Hebrews plead further against the Marcionites, denying that any quantity of gold and silver would be enough to compensate them, if the labour of six hundred thousand men over so many years were valued at even a single coin a day. Which is the greater claim: that of those demanding back vessels, or of those who built country houses and cities? Which, then, is greater: the Egyptians' complaint or the Hebrews' claim? If free men, forced into a workhouse, were to strike back at the Egyptians only with a suit for injuries — if only their overseers were to show before the judges' benches their backs torn by the insulting savagery of the lash — the court would have pronounced that satisfaction was due to the Hebrews not with a few dishes and cups, the property of a few rich men at most, but with the entire wealth of them all and a levy on the whole population. If, then, the Hebrews' cause is good, the Creator's cause too — that is, his command — is good, who both made the Egyptians generous without their knowing it and, at the time of the departure, settled accounts with his people by the slight comfort of a silent compensation. He plainly ordered less to be exacted than was owed: for the Egyptians ought to have given the Hebrews back their sons as well.

So too in other matters you reproach him with contradictory precepts, as fickle and unstable: forbidding work on the sabbath and yet commanding the ark to be carried around for eight days — that is, on a sabbath too — in the siege of the city of Jericho. For you do not look into the law of the sabbath either, which forbids human works, not divine. For “six days,” it says, “you shall labour and do all your works, but the seventh day is the sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work on it.” What work? Surely your own. For it follows that he took away on the sabbath those works which he had assigned above to the six days — yours, that is, human and daily ones. But carrying the ark around cannot be thought either a daily work or a human one; it was rare and sacred, and, since it came at that time from God's own command, surely divine. What this itself signified I would explain, were it not tedious to unfold the figures in all the Creator's matters, which perhaps you do not even accept. But it is more telling if you are refuted from plain facts, by the simplicity of truth, not by ingenuity. So now there is a sure distinction: the sabbath forbids human works, not divine. And therefore the man who gathered sticks on the sabbath was put to death, for he had done his own work, which the law forbade; but those who carried the ark around on sabbaths did so with impunity, for they had carried out not their own work but God's, at his own command.

Likewise, in forbidding the making of a likeness of anything in heaven and on earth and in the waters, he also showed the reasons. For he adds: “You shall not worship them nor serve them.” But the image of the bronze serpent, afterwards commanded to Moses by the Lord, did not belong under the heading of idolatry; it served to heal those who were being attacked by serpents — and I say nothing of the figure in the remedy. So too the golden cherubim and seraphim, a figurative model on the ark, were certainly a simple ornament, fitted to the stand; having reasons far different from the condition of idolatry for which likeness is forbidden, they do not seem to contradict the law forbidding likenesses, since they are not found in that state of likeness for which likeness is forbidden.

We have spoken of the rational institution of sacrifices, which called those duties away from idols to God. And if he afterwards cast them off again, saying, “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?”, he wanted precisely this to be understood: that he had not required them for his own sake. “For I will not drink,” he says, “the blood of bulls”; as he says elsewhere too: “The eternal God will neither hunger nor thirst.” For although he looked with favour on Abel's offerings and gladly smelled Noah's burnt offerings, what pleasure is there in the entrails of sheep or in the smoke of burning victims? But the simple and God-fearing mind of those who offered to God what they had from God, both food and sweet savour, was counted as thanks before God, who did not require what was done but that for which it was done, namely the honour of God. If a client offers a rich man or a king, who wants for nothing, some little gift, however cheap, will the size and quality of the gift shame the rich man and king, or will the dutiful intent delight him? But if a client offers him gifts, whether of his own accord or even as prescribed in his turn, and observes the king's solemnities, yet not in good faith, nor with a pure heart, nor with full obedience in other matters too, does it not follow that the king or rich man would exclaim: “What to me is the multitude of your gifts?” … “I am full,” and in saying “your solemnities and feast days and your sabbaths” — which, by celebrating them according to their own desire and not according to the religion of God, they had already made their own and not God's. So he showed that his rejection of the things he had prescribed to be performed was conditional and rational.

But if you would also have him understood as fickle in regard to persons, when he rejects those he once approved, or as improvident, when he approves those who are later to be rejected — as though he either condemned his own past judgments or did not know the future — yet nothing so befits one who is both good and a judge as to reject and to choose according to present merits. Saul is chosen, but not yet as a despiser of the prophet Samuel. Solomon is rejected, but only when already possessed by foreign women and enslaved to the idols of the Moabites and Sidonians. What should the Creator have done so as not to be censured by the Marcionites? Condemn in advance those still acting well, on account of sins to come? But it was not for a good God to condemn in advance those who did not yet deserve it. Or, on the other hand, not reject those now sinning, on account of their former good deeds? But it was not for a just judge to pardon crimes once the former good deeds had been cancelled. Or what man is without sin, so that God should always choose him and could never reject him? Or likewise, who is without any good work, so that God should always reject him and could never choose him? Show me one who is always good, and he will not be rejected; show me one who is always evil, and he will never be chosen. But if … the same man, being in both states at different times, will be assessed in both by God, who is both good and judge, and who does not change his sentences out of fickleness or lack of foresight, but with the weightiest and most provident judgment gives to each time its merits.

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.

Now, to dispose of everything of this kind, I shall go on to interpret and clear up the other pettinesses, weaknesses, and incongruities, as you think them. God calls out: “Adam, where are you?” — not knowing, of course, where he was; and when Adam pleads the shame of his nakedness, God asks whether he has tasted of the tree — being uncertain, of course! On the contrary, he was neither uncertain of the deed nor ignorant of the place. Rather, it was fitting that the man hiding in the consciousness of his sin should be summoned to come out into the Lord's sight, not by the mere calling of his name but with some reproach, even then, for what he had done. For “Adam, where are you?” is not to be read in a simple, that is, a questioning tone, but in an emphatic, striking, and accusing one: “Adam, where are you!” — that is, you are lost, you are no longer here — so that the cry is one both of rebuke and of grief. Otherwise, from the eyes of him who holds the whole world in his hand like a nest, whose throne is heaven and whose footstool is the earth, some corner of paradise had escaped, no doubt, so that he could not see Adam, wherever he was, before calling him — both hiding and eating of the forbidden fruit! The hare or the petty thief does not escape the watchman of your vineyard or garden; so think that God, sharper-eyed from on high, cannot miss anything beneath him. Fool, to turn up your nose at so great a proof of divine majesty and of human instruction! God asks as though uncertain so that here too, proving that man has free choice, he might give him room, in the matter of denial or confession, to confess his sin of his own accord and so to lighten it. So too he asks Cain where his brother is, as though he had not already heard Abel's blood crying out from the earth, so that Cain too might have the power, by the same power of choice, to deny his sin of his own accord and so to aggravate it. And so examples were established for us of confessing rather than denying sins, so that even then the gospel teaching might begin: “By your mouth you will be justified, and by your mouth you will be condemned.”

For although Adam was given over to death because of the state of the law, hope is kept safe for him, as the Lord says: “Behold, Adam has become like one of us” — concerning, that is, man's future adoption into divinity. And then what follows? “And now, lest he stretch out his hand and take of the tree of life and live forever.” For by inserting “and now,” a word of present time, he shows that he has made a delay of life which is temporary and for the present. And so he cursed neither Adam himself nor Eve, as candidates for restoration, as relieved by their confession; but Cain he both cursed and, when Cain wished to atone for his sin by death, forbade him to die for the time being, since besides his crime he was burdened also with its denial. This, then, will be the ignorance of our God, which is feigned so that sinning man may not be ignorant of what he must do. Again, going down to Sodom and Gomorrah he says: “I will see whether they are doing altogether according to the cry that has come to me; and if not, that I may know” — here too, no doubt, uncertain from ignorance and eager to know! Or is the tone of the utterance necessary here too, expressing not a doubting but a threatening sense under the guise of inquiry? And if you also mock God's coming down, as though he could not carry out judgment without coming down, take care you do not strike your own god too. For he too came down to accomplish what he wished.