Against Marcion 2.26–3.6

But God also swears. By Marcion's god, perhaps? “No,” he says, “much more idly: by himself.” What would you have him do, if no other god was within his knowledge — especially when he swears precisely that there is no other at all besides himself? Do you catch him, then, perjuring himself, or swearing idly? But he cannot be seen to have perjured himself who did not know, as you say, that another existed; for in swearing to what he knew, he swore truly and did not perjure himself. Nor does he swear idly that there is no other god. For he would swear idly only if there had been no one who believed in other gods — then the worshippers of images, and now the heretics too. He swears by himself, then, so that you might believe God, at least on oath, that there is no other god at all. You too, Marcion, compelled God to do this; for even then you were foreseen. Likewise, if he swears in his promises or threats, extorting a faith that was difficult in the beginning, nothing is unworthy of God that makes men believe God.

“God was petty enough then, even in his very ferocity, when, enraged against the people over the consecration of the calf, he demands of his servant Moses: Let me alone, and in indignant anger I will destroy them, and I will make you a great nation.” That is why you are accustomed to declare that Moses was better than his God, as the one who interceded — indeed, who prevented his anger: “For you shall not do this,” he says, “or else spend me too along with them.” You too are to be pitied along with the people, you who do not recognize Christ, prefigured in the person of Moses, the intercessor with the Father, who offers his own life for the salvation of the people. But it is enough that for the present the people was granted to Moses in his own right. So that the servant might be able to ask this of the Lord, the Lord asked it of himself. For this reason he said to the servant, “Let me alone, and I will destroy them”: so that Moses, by asking and offering himself, would not let him alone; and so you might learn how much is allowed to a faithful man and a prophet with God.

Now, to dispose of the rest in brief — whatever else you collect as petty, weak, and unworthy, in order to destroy the Creator — I shall set out one simple and sure reason: God could not have entered into dealings with men unless he had taken on human feelings and affections, by which he might temper with humility the force of his majesty, which human smallness surely could not bear. This humility was unworthy of himself but necessary for man, and so already worthy of God, since nothing is so worthy of God as the salvation of man. I should treat this more fully if I were dealing with pagans — although the encounter with heretics is not very different — but since you yourselves already believe that God has lived in the form and the whole order of the human condition, you will surely not require long persuading that God conformed himself to humanity; you are refuted by your own faith. For if God — and a loftier god at that — laid low the height of his majesty with such humility as even to be subjected to death, and the death of the cross, why should you not think that some pettinesses befitted our God too — more tolerable, at any rate, than the insults of the Jews and the gibbet and the tomb? Or are these the pettinesses which must from now on prejudge that Christ, exposed to human sufferings, belongs to that God whom you reproach with human traits?

For we too profess that Christ always acted in the name of God the Father; that it was he himself who lived among men from the beginning, he himself who met with the patriarchs and prophets: the Son of the Creator, his Word, whom by bringing him forth from himself he made his Son, and thereafter set over his whole arrangement and will, making him a little lower than the angels, as is written in his Scripture. By this lowering he was also appointed by the Father to those things which you censure as human, learning even from the beginning what he was to be at the end. It is he who comes down, he who asks, he who demands, he who swears. Moreover, even the gospel we hold in common will testify that the Father has been seen by no one, since Christ says: “No one has known the Father except the Son.” For he himself had declared in the Old Testament too: “No one shall see God and live,” marking the Father as invisible, in whose authority and name he himself was God who was seen, the Son of God. But with us too Christ is received in the person of Christ, because in this way too he is ours. Whatever, then, you require as worthy of God will be found in the Father, invisible and unapproachable and serene, the god, so to speak, of the philosophers; but whatever you censure as unworthy will be reckoned to the Son, who was seen and heard and met with, the Father's agent and minister, mingling in himself man and God — God in mighty works, man in weaknesses — so that he confers on man as much as he takes from God.

In short, the whole of what you count my God's disgrace is the sacrament of human salvation. God lived among men in human fashion so that man might be taught to act in divine fashion. God dealt with man as an equal so that man might be able to deal with God as an equal. God was found small so that man might become very great. You who disdain such a God — I do not know whether you believe, in faith, in a crucified God. How great, then, is your perversity toward both aspects of the Creator! You designate him a judge, and reproach as cruelty the judge's severity, which fits the merits of the cases; you demand a supremely good God, and belittle as pettiness his gentleness, which fits his kindness and has been conducted more humbly to suit the capacity of human smallness. Neither the great God pleases you nor the small, neither the judge nor the friend. What if the same things are now detected in yours as well? We have already shown in its own book that he too is a judge, and, being a judge, necessarily severe, and, being severe, of course cruel — if severity is cruel at all.

Now, regarding pettinesses and malignities and the other marks of censure, I too will make rival antitheses against Marcion. If my God did not know that there was another above him, your god too did not know at all that there was another below him. For what does that obscure Heraclitus say? “The way up and the way down are the same.” In short, if he had not been ignorant, he would have opposed him from the beginning. Sin and death, and the devil himself, the author of sin, and every evil which my God allowed to exist — this yours too allowed, since he allowed my God to allow it. Our God changed his sentences; just so did yours. For he who looked upon the human race so late changed that sentence by which for so long an age he did not look upon it. Our God repented of something; so did yours. For by at last turning his attention to man's salvation he repented of his former neglect, a repentance owed for a bad deed. And the neglect of human salvation will be counted a bad deed, amended with your god only by repentance. Our God commanded a fraud — but of gold and silver. But as much as man is more precious than gold and silver, so much more fraudulent is your god, who snatches man away from his lord and maker. Our God demands an eye for an eye; but yours, by forbidding retaliation, rather multiplies injury. For who will not strike again if he is not struck back? Our God did not know what sort of men he was choosing; neither, then, did yours: he would not have chosen Judas the traitor if he had known beforehand. If you say that the Creator lied somewhere, a far greater lie is in your Christ, whose body was not real. The cruelty of my God has consumed many; your god too surely consigns to destruction those he does not save. My God ordered someone to be killed; yours willed himself to be killed, no less a murderer of himself than of the one by whom he wished to be killed. And I will prove to Marcion that his god killed many: for he made the people murderers, who will surely perish — unless they did no wrong against Christ. But the ready strength of truth is content with few words; falsehood will need many.

For the rest, I would have cut down Marcion's Antitheses themselves at close quarters, if the defence of the Creator needed a more laborious demolition of them — the Creator who is both good and judge, according to examples of each aspect that befit God, as we have shown. But if both aspects, goodness and justice, make up the worthy fullness of the divinity of the Almighty, I can meanwhile beat back in brief the Antitheses, which are eager to distinguish Christ from the Creator by the qualities of their characters, or of their laws, or of their mighty works, and so to estrange them, as the supremely good from the judge, the gentle from the fierce, the saving from the destroying. For they rather join together those whom they set in differences that befit God. Take away Marcion's title and the aim and purpose of his work itself, and it … nothing other than a demonstration of one and the same God, supremely good and judge, since these two belong to God alone. For the very effort to set Christ against the Creator in those examples points rather to their unity. For so truly was the substance of divinity one and the same, good and severe, that by the same examples and in similar matters it chose to show its goodness where it had first shown its severity; and the difference of times will be no wonder, if God is afterwards milder because things have been tamed, who before was more austere because they were untamed. So by means of the Antitheses it can more easily be shown that the Creator's order was reformed by Christ rather than struck down, restored rather than excluded — especially since you set your god apart from every harsher emotion, and so surely from rivalry with the Creator too. For if so, how do the Antitheses show him rivalling the Creator in each particular? I shall recognize, then, in this also, through them, my jealous God, who by his own right, with a good because rational jealousy, took care to bring to ripeness his works that at the beginning were still rough and woody; whose antitheses even his world itself will acknowledge, regulated as it is out of contrary elements, yet by the highest reason. Therefore, most thoughtless Marcion, you ought to have shown one god of light and another of darkness, so that you might more easily have persuaded us of one god of goodness and another of severity. But the antitheses will belong to him to whom they belong in the world too.

Following the footprints of my earlier work, which I am persevering in restoring after it was lost, the order of argument now turns to Christ, though this is more than is needed after the defense of the one Godhead has been completed. For it has been sufficiently settled in advance that Christ is to be understood as belonging to no other god than the Creator, once it has been determined that no god other than the Creator is to be believed; whom Christ so preached, and after him the apostles proclaimed a Christ belonging to no other than the God whom Christ preached, that is, the Creator, that no mention of another god, and so of another Christ, was ever raised before the scandal of Marcion. This is most easily proved by a review of the apostolic and the heretical churches: the perversion of the rule must be declared to lie there, clearly, where it is found to come later. I wove this into my first book as well. But now too this engagement, which will examine Christ separately, will certainly be of use to this end: that while we prove Christ to be the Creator's, Marcion's god is in this way also shut out. It befits the truth to use all its strength, not as though it were struggling (for it wins in any case by the short ways of prescription) but as eager to meet its adversary everywhere, an adversary so frenzied that he has more readily presumed that a Christ has come who was never announced than that one has come who was always foretold.

From here, then, I take my first step: whether he ought to have come so suddenly. First, as being himself the Son of his God; for the proper order was that the Father should acknowledge the Son before the Son the Father, and that the Father should bear witness about the Son before the Son about the Father. Next, as one sent, apart from the name of Son. For the backing of the sender ought likewise to have gone before, as testimony for the one sent, since no one who comes on another's authority vindicates that authority for himself by his own assertion; rather he waits to be vindicated by it, the recommendation of the one who grants the authority going before him. Otherwise neither will he be recognized as a son whom a father has never named, nor believed to be sent whom a commissioner has never designated. The father would have named him, and the commissioner designated him, if there had been such. Everything that departs from the rule of things will be held suspect, a rule which does not allow the principal degrees to be recognized afterwards: the father after the son, the commissioner after the commissioned, God after Christ. Nothing that is prior in its origin comes later in recognition, because it does not come later in arrangement either. A sudden son, a suddenly sent one, a sudden Christ! But I would think nothing from God is sudden, because nothing from God is not arranged. And if arranged, why not also foretold, so that it could be proved both to be arranged, from the foretelling, and to be divine, from the arrangement? And surely so great a work, one being prepared for human salvation, should not have been sudden, at least in so far as it was to profit by means of faith. For in so far as it had to be believed in order to profit, to that extent it required preparation so that it could be believed, built up on the foundations of arrangement and foretelling, so that faith, shaped by this order, might rightly be both laid upon man by God and rendered to God by man, owing belief out of recognition: because it could believe, having learned from the foretelling what to believe.

“There was no need,” you say, “for an order of that kind, because he was going to prove at once, by the facts themselves, through the evidence of mighty works, that he was Son and Sent and the Christ of God.” But I will deny that this kind of evidence alone was adequate to testify for him, since he himself later stripped it of its authority. For when he declared that many would come and do signs and perform great mighty works, to the point of turning aside even the elect, and yet were not on that account to be received, he showed that faith based on signs and mighty works is rash, since they come very easily even to false Christs. Or what sort of thing is it that he wished to be proved, understood, and received from the very source (from mighty works, I mean) from which he did not wish the others to be, though they too were to come just as suddenly and were announced by no authority? If, because he came before them and was first to set his seal on the evidence of mighty works, he therefore seized faith for himself, like a place in the baths, and snatched it away from all who came after, beware lest he himself too be caught in the position of those who come later, found to be later than the Creator, who was already known before, who likewise performed mighty works before, and who likewise warned that others were not to be believed, namely those coming after him. So if having come first and having first made pronouncements about those to come after is what secures faith, he too will have been condemned in advance by the one after whom he was recognized, and the authority of laying down this rule about later comers will belong to the Creator alone, who, being later than no one, could not … Now then, since I am going to prove that the Creator both in times past performed through his servants the very same mighty works which you claim for your Christ as the only ground of faith, and appointed them to be performed through his own Christ, I can on this ground too rightly lay down in advance that your Christ ought all the more not to have been believed on the ground of mighty works alone, in that people could have interpreted him as belonging to no other than the Creator, since the works corresponded to the Creator's mighty works, both those performed through his servants and those promised for his Christ. And yet, even if other evidences were found in your Christ, new ones naturally, we would more readily believe that the new ones too belonged to the one to whom the old ones also belong than to one to whom only new ones belong, which lack the proof of trust that belongs to victorious antiquity. So on this ground too he ought to have come foretold, with foretellings of his own building up faith in him as well as mighty works; above all since he was to come against the Creator's Christ, who was fortified with both signs and prophecies of his own, so that as rival of that Christ he might shine out in every kind of difference. But how could his Christ be foretold by a god who was never foretold? This, then, is what you demand: that neither your god nor your Christ be believed, since both the god ought not to have been unknown and the Christ ought to have been recognized through the god.

He disdained, I suppose, to imitate the order of our God, as one who displeased him and was above all to be refuted. A new god, he chose to come in a new way: a son before the father's acknowledgement, and one sent before the commissioner's authority, so as to introduce a most monstrous faith as well, by which one would believe that Christ had come before one knew that he existed. It also falls to me to take up this question: why did he not come after Christ? For when I consider his god, so patient for so long an age with a most harsh Creator, who meanwhile was announcing his own Christ to mankind, I say that for whatever reason he did this, deferring both his revelation and his intervention, for that same reason he ought to have shown patience with the Creator in his Christ too, who was going to carry out his arrangements, so that when every operation of the rival god and the rival Christ had been completed and fulfilled, he might then bring in his own arrangements over them. But if he repented of so great patience, in that he did not persevere to the end of the Creator's affairs, he tolerated in vain the foretelling of that god's Christ, whose appearing he did not tolerate. Either he broke into the course of another's time without reason, or without reason he did not break into it for so long. What held him back, or what disturbed him? In fact he offended both ways: revealed so late after the Creator, and so hastily before his Christ. The one he ought to have exposed long ago, the other not yet: he should not have endured the one raging so long, nor disturbed the other while still at rest. Toward both he falls short of the title of the “good God,” and shows himself changeable and uncertain: lukewarm toward the Creator, hot against Christ, and futile in both directions. For he no more restrained the Creator than he blocked Christ. The Creator remains just what he is; and Christ will come just as he is written. Why did he come after the Creator, whom he could not correct? Why was he revealed before that god's Christ, whom he could not call back? Or if he corrected the Creator, being revealed after him so that what needed correcting should come first, then he ought equally to have waited for his Christ in order to correct him too, and so be his later corrector as well as the Creator's. It is another matter if he too is to come again after him, so that in his first coming he advanced against the Creator, destroying his law and prophets, and in his second advances against Christ, refuting his kingdom. Then, therefore, he will complete his order; then, perhaps, he should be believed. Or if his business is already finished now, then he will come in vain, since he will have nothing to accomplish.

Let these be my opening skirmishes, as it were from the first line and still at a distance. But from here on, since I am going to fight at close quarters and with certainty, I see that certain lines must still be drawn in advance along which the fight will be fought, namely the Scriptures of the Creator. For since I am going to prove from them that Christ was the Creator's, as having been later fulfilled in his Christ, I must also set out the form, and so to speak the nature, of these Scriptures themselves, so that they are not drawn into controversy just when they are brought to bear on the issues, and dull the reader's attention by mixing their own defense with the defense of the issues. I therefore put forward two features of prophetic speech which our adversaries must from now on acknowledge. The first is that future things are sometimes stated as already past. For it befits the Godhead to regard whatever it has decreed as accomplished, because with it there is no distinction of time, since eternity itself directs a uniform state of time in it; and it is more natural to prophetic divination to show what it foresees, while it foresees it, as already seen and so already completed, that is, as in every way certain to come, as through Isaiah: “I gave my back to the scourges, and my cheeks to the palms of the hand, and I did not turn my face away from spitting.” For whether Christ was already then speaking of himself, as we hold, or the prophet of himself, as the Jews hold, what had not yet been done was nonetheless voiced as already past. The other feature will be that many things are foretold figuratively, through riddles, allegories, and parables, to be understood otherwise than as written. For we read that the mountains will drip sweetness, yet not so that you should expect grape syrup from the rocks or boiled-down wine from the cliffs; and we hear of a land flowing with milk and honey, yet not so that you should believe you will ever make cakes and Samian delicacies out of clods of earth. For God did not straightaway promise to be a water-finder and a farmer when he said, “I will put rivers in a thirsty region, and box and cedar in the wilderness”; just as, foretelling the conversion of the nations, “The beasts of the field will bless me, the sirens and the daughters of the sparrows,” he certainly does not mean to bring back happy omens from swallows' chicks and little foxes and those monstrous, fabled songstresses. And why should I say more of this kind? Since even the heretics' apostle interprets the law itself, which allows the ox that treads the grain a free mouth, as said not of oxen but of us; and asserts that the rock which accompanied them to supply drink was Christ; teaching the Galatians likewise that the two accounts of Abraham's sons ran as allegory, and suggesting to the Ephesians that what was declared at the beginning of man, who would leave father and mother and the two would become one flesh, he recognizes as referring to Christ and the church.

If these two peculiarities of Jewish literature are sufficiently established for the present, remember, reader, that it has been settled that, when we bring forward anything of this kind, the question is not reopened about the form of Scripture but concerns the state of the case. Since, then, heretical madness presumed that a Christ had come who had never been announced, it followed that it should contend that the Christ who had always been foretold had not yet come; and so it was forced to join with the error of the Jews and build its argument from it, as though the Jews, themselves certain that the one who came was a stranger, not only rejected him as a foreigner but even killed him as an adversary, whereas they would doubtless have recognized him and attended him with every duty of religion if he had been theirs. No doubt a law, not of Rhodes but of Pontus, had provided for that ship-owner that the Jews could not err about their own Christ; when, even if nothing of the kind were found foretold against them, the human condition alone, liable to deception, would surely have persuaded him that the Jews could err, being men, and that no prejudgment should be taken from the opinion of those who may credibly have erred. Moreover, since it was also foretold that they would not recognize Christ and therefore would even put him to death, then he will be the very one who was both unrecognized and put to death by them, against whom they were marked out beforehand to commit such things. If you demand proof of this, I shall not unroll those Scriptures which, declaring that Christ could be put to death, also affirm that he could go unrecognized (for unless he were unrecognized, he could suffer nothing); but, keeping those for the question of the sufferings, it will suffice at present to bring forward those foretellings which meanwhile prove that Christ could go unrecognized, and that briefly, since they show that all power of understanding was taken away from the people by the Creator. “I will take away,” he says, “the wisdom of their wise, and the prudence of their prudent I will hide”; and: “With the ear you will hear and not hear, and with the eyes you will see and not see; for the heart of this people has grown fat, and with their ears they have heard heavily, and their eyes they have shut, lest at some time they hear with their ears and see with their eyes and understand with their heart and turn, and I heal them.” They had deserved this dulling of their saving senses, loving God with their lips but in heart standing far off from him. So if Christ was being announced by the Creator, who establishes the thunder and creates the wind and announces his Christ to mankind according to the prophet Joel; if all the hope of the Jews, not to say also of the Gentiles, was directed toward the revelation of Christ, then without doubt it was being shown that they would not recognize or understand what was being announced, that is Christ, the powers of recognition and understanding, wisdom and prudence, having been taken away; that their chief wise men, that is the scribes, and their prudent men, that is the Pharisees, would err about him; and likewise that the people would hear with their ears and not hear, Christ teaching, of course, and see with their eyes and not see, Christ doing signs, of course; according to what is said elsewhere as well: “And who is blind but my servants? And who is deaf but those who rule over them?” And also when he reproaches them through the same Isaiah: “Sons I have begotten and raised up, but they have rejected me; the ox knew its owner and the ass its master's manger, but Israel has not known me and the people has not understood me.” We indeed are certain that Christ always spoke in the prophets (the Spirit of the Creator, as the prophet testifies: “The person of our spirit, Christ the Lord”), who from the beginning, as the Father's deputy, was both heard and seen in the name of God; and we know that such were his words, even then reproaching Israel for what they were foretold to commit against him: “You have forsaken the Lord and provoked the Holy One of Israel to anger.” But if you prefer to refer the whole charge of Jewish ignorance of old not to Christ but rather to God himself, unwilling to grant that even in the past the Word and Spirit, that is, the Creator's Christ, was despised and not recognized by them, even so you are refuted. For since you do not deny that his Christ is the Son and Spirit and substance of the Creator, you must concede that those who did not recognize the Father could not recognize the Son either, by the condition of the same substance; for if its fullness was not understood, much more so the portion, as sharer in the fullness. With these matters thus examined, it is now clear how the Jews both rejected Christ and killed him: not understanding him as a foreign Christ, but not recognizing him as their own. For they could not have understood a foreign one about whom nothing had ever been announced, whereas they could have understood one who had always been foretold. For that alone admits of being understood or not understood which, having the substance of a foretelling, will have the material for either recognition or error; what lacks that material does not allow any outcome of wisdom. And so it was not as the Christ of another god that they turned from him and persecuted him, but only as a man whom they thought a deceiver in his signs and a rival in his teachings; so that they brought the man himself to judgment as their own, that is a Jew, but a subverter and destroyer of Judaism, and punished him by their own law, which they would not have used in judging a stranger. So far are they from seeming to have understood Christ as a stranger, that they did not even judge his humanity as that of a stranger.