Against Marcion 5.14–5.17

If the Father sent him in the likeness of sinful flesh, the flesh that was seen in him is not therefore to be called a phantom. For above he ascribed sin to the flesh and made it the law of sin dwelling in his members and opposing the law of the mind. For this reason, then, the Son was sent in the likeness of sinful flesh, to redeem the flesh of sin by a like substance, that is, by flesh which was like sinful flesh, though it was not itself sinful. For this too will be God's power: to accomplish salvation in a substance of the same kind. For it would be nothing great if the Spirit of God healed the flesh; but it is great if flesh does so, flesh altogether like sinful flesh in that it is flesh, but not flesh of sin. So the likeness will relate to the title of sin, not to a falsehood of substance. For he would not have added “of sin” if he wanted the likeness to be understood of the substance, so as to deny its reality; he would have put only “of flesh,” not also “of sin.” But since he framed it thus, “of sinful flesh,” he both affirmed the substance, that is, the flesh, and referred the likeness to the fault of the substance, that is, to sin. Suppose now that the likeness is said of the substance: not even so will the reality of the substance be denied. Why then “like,” if real? Because real indeed, but not from seed: like in its state and real, but unlike in its origin. Besides, there is no likeness between contraries. Spirit would not be called a likeness of flesh (since flesh would not admit a likeness of spirit either), but it would be called a phantom, if what was not there was seen. But a thing is called a likeness when what is seen really is; for it is, in being equal to another. A phantom, however, being only a phantom, is not a likeness. Here too, explaining how he does not want us to be in the flesh, though we are in the flesh, namely that we should not be in the works of the flesh, he shows that it was in this sense that he wrote, “Flesh and blood will not obtain the kingdom of God,” condemning not the substance but its works; and these, because they can be avoided by us while we are still placed in the flesh, will belong not to the guilt of the substance but to that of conduct. Again, if the body is indeed dead because of sin (so the death is not of the soul but of the body), but the spirit is life because of righteousness, … to that to which death came because of sin, that is, to the body. For a thing is restored to no one but to him who lost it, and so the resurrection of the dead will be the resurrection of bodies. For he also adds: “He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies.” So he both confirmed the resurrection of the flesh, without which neither can anything be called a body nor anything be understood as mortal, and proved that Christ's substance was bodily; since our mortal bodies will be given life in the same way as he too was raised, and in no other way the same, except because it was in the body. Here too I leap over a very large gap where the text has been cut away; but I seize on the apostle bearing witness to Israel that they have a zeal for God, their own God of course, yet not according to knowledge. “For,” he says, “not knowing God and seeking to establish their own righteousness, they did not submit to the righteousness of God; for Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.” Here the heretic's argument will be that the Jews did not know the higher God, since against him they set up their own righteousness, that is, that of their own law, not receiving Christ, the end of the law. Why then does he bear witness to their zeal for their own God, unless he is also reproaching them with ignorance toward that same God, that they were driven indeed by zeal for God but not according to knowledge, not knowing him, that is, since they did not know his arrangements in Christ, who was to bring the law to its completion, and so they defended their own righteousness against him? And so the Creator himself also testifies to their ignorance toward him: “Israel has not known me, and my people has not understood me,” and that they rather set up their own righteousness: “teaching the doctrines and precepts of men”; and that they had also gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ, out of ignorance, of course. So nothing that fits the Creator can be interpreted of another god, since otherwise the apostle would have wrongly taunted the Jews with ignorance toward an unknown god. For what wrong had they done if they were setting up the righteousness of their own God against one whom they did not know? And yet he cries out: “O the depth of the riches and wisdom of God, and how unsearchable are his ways!” Where does this outburst come from? From the recollection, of course, of the Scriptures which he had been unrolling before, from the contemplation of the mysteries which he had set out above concerning faith in Christ coming from the law. If Marcion erased these on purpose, why does his apostle cry out, beholding no riches of God, of a god as poor and needy as one who founded nothing, foretold nothing, in short had nothing, since he came down into another's property? But in fact both the apostle and the riches belong to the Creator, riches once hidden and now unlocked. For so he had promised: “And I will give them hidden treasures; I will open to them things unseen.” From this, then, came the cry, “O the depth of the riches and wisdom of God!” whose treasures now lay open. That is Isaiah's; and so is what follows, from the book of the same prophet: “For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counsellor? Who has given to him, and it will be repaid him?” You who have taken so much away from the Scriptures, why did you keep these, as though they too were not the Creator's? Let us see, of course, the precepts of the new god. “Hating what is evil,” he says, “and cleaving to what is good”: is the Creator's precept any different, “Put away the evil from among you,” and, “Turn away from evil and do good”? “Loving one another with brotherly affection”: is this not the same as “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”? “Rejoicing in hope,” in God, of course: “For it is good to hope in the Lord rather than to hope in rulers.” “Enduring affliction”: “For the Lord will hear you in the day of affliction” (you have the psalm). “Bless, and do not curse”: who will teach this better than he who founded all things with blessings? “Not minding high things, but going along with the lowly; do not be wise in your own sight”: for they hear “woe” through Isaiah. “Repay no one evil for evil”: “and do not remember your brother's malice.” “Not avenging yourselves; for vengeance is mine, and I will repay, says the Lord.” “Have peace with all men.” So the law's retaliation did not permit repaying an injury, but checked its beginning by the fear of repayment. Rightly, then, he summed up the whole of the Creator's rule of life in his chief precept: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” If this completion of the law comes from the law itself, I no longer know who the God of the law is; I fear it may be Marcion's god! But if the gospel of Christ is fulfilled by this precept, and it is not the Creator's Christ, what are we still contending about? Whether Christ said it or not, “I have not come to destroy the law but to fulfil it,” the man from Pontus labored in vain at denying that saying: if the gospel has not fulfilled the law, then see, the law has fulfilled the gospel. And it is well that at the close he threatens the judgment seat of Christ, surely of a judge and avenger, surely the Creator's, certainly establishing that the one he holds out to be feared is the one whose favour must be won, even if he were preaching another.

It will be no trouble to attend to the shorter letters too. There is flavour even in a little. The Jews had killed their own prophets. I can say: what has that to do with the apostle of another god, and the best god at that, who is said not to condemn even the sins of his own people, and who himself, by destroying those same prophets, in a way kills them? What wrong did Israel commit in his eyes if it killed those whom he too rejected, if it passed a hostile sentence on them before he did? But it sinned against its own God: he will reproach the iniquity to whom the injured party belongs; certainly anyone rather than the adversary of the injured. Nor would he have loaded them with the charge of the Lord's death too, saying that they killed both the Lord and their own prophets (although “their own” is the heretic's addition). For what would be so bitter in their having killed Christ, the preacher of another god, when they had slaughtered the prophets of their own God? But the point of the heightening is that they had killed both the Lord and his servants. In short, if they killed the Christ of one god and the prophets of another, he made the impiety equal; he did not heighten it. But it was not to be made equal; so it could not have been heightened unless both crimes were committed against the same God. So the Christ and the prophets belong to the same God. What sanctification of ours he calls “the will of God” may be recognized from the opposites which he forbids: “to abstain,” he says, from fornication, not from marriage; “that each should know how to possess his own vessel in honour.” How? “Not in lust, as the nations do.” But not even among the nations is lust ascribed to marriage, but to the extravagant, unnatural, and monstrous forms of self-indulgence. It is contrary to every kind of vileness and uncleanness; it does not exclude marriage but lust, and handles our vessel in the honour of marriage. I would treat this passage while keeping the preference for the other, that is, the fuller holiness, setting continence and virginity above marriage, yet without forbidding it. For I am beating back those who destroy the God of marriage, not those who pursue chastity. He says that those who remain until the coming of Christ, together with the dead in Christ, who will rise first, will be caught up in the clouds into the air to meet the Lord. I recognize that the heavenly beings, having already then foreseen these things, marvelled at the Jerusalem that is above itself, and declared through Isaiah: “Who are these who fly hither like clouds, like doves with their young, to me?” If Christ will prepare this ascent for us, he will be the Christ of whom Hosea speaks: “who builds his ascent into the heavens,” for himself, surely, and for his own. From whom, then, shall I now hope for it, if not from him from whom I heard these things? What Spirit does he forbid to be quenched, and what prophecies does he forbid to be despised? Surely not the Creator's Spirit nor the Creator's prophecies, in Marcion's view. For what he destroys he has himself already quenched and made nothing of, and he cannot forbid what he himself has done. So it falls to Marcion to produce today, in his own church, the Spirit of his god, which is not to be quenched, and prophecies which are not to be despised. And if he has produced what he thinks such, let him know that we will challenge whatever it is by the standard of spiritual and prophetic grace and power: that it foretell things to come, reveal the secrets of the heart, and expound mysteries. When he has brought forward and proved nothing of the kind, we will bring forward both the Spirit and the prophecies of the Creator, speaking according to his will. And so it will be clear what the apostle was speaking of: namely, of the things that were to be in the church of that God who, since he exists, also has his Spirit at work and his promise fulfilled. Come now, you who reject the salvation of the flesh, and, whenever the body is named in such a context, interpret it as some other thing, I know not what, rather than the substance of the flesh: how is it that the apostle distinguished all the substances in us by definite names and placed them all under one prayer for salvation, wishing that our “spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord and Saviour Christ”? For he named both soul and body, as two things and as different. For even if the soul too is a body of some quality of its own, as the spirit also is, still, since body and soul are named separately, the soul has its own proper name and does not need the common word “body”; that is left to the flesh, which, not being named by its own name, must use the common one. And indeed I see no other substance in man, after the spirit and the soul, to which the word “body” can be applied, except the flesh; and I understand the flesh under the name “body” whenever it is not named, much more here, when what is called the body is called by its own name.

We are compelled to repeat some things again and again, so as to confirm what hangs together with them. Here too we say that a Lord who repays both kinds of desert is carried about by the apostle: either the Creator or, which Marcion would not want, one like the Creator, with whom it is just to repay affliction to those who afflict us, and to us who are afflicted rest, at the revelation of the Lord Jesus coming from heaven with the angels of his power and in a flame of fire. But the heretic, by deleting “flame” and “fire,” has quenched them, so as not to make him our God. Yet the emptiness of the erasure shines through. For since the apostle writes that the Lord will come to take vengeance on those who do not know God and who do not obey the gospel, who, he says, will pay the penalty of eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his power, it follows that he brings in a flame of fire, since he is coming to punish. So in this too, against Marcion's will, Christ belongs to the God who burns; and in that other point he belongs to the Creator, in that he also takes vengeance on those who do not know the Lord, that is, on the heathen. For he set apart … those who do not obey the gospel, whether sinful Christians or Jews. Now to exact penalties from the heathen, who may not have known the gospel, is not the part of that god who is by nature unknown and has been revealed nowhere except in the gospel, and so is not knowable by all. But to the Creator even natural knowledge is owed, by understanding him from his works and then seeking a fuller knowledge of him. It belongs, then, to him to punish even those who do not know God, since he may not be ignored. The very words, “from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his power,” which use the words of Isaiah and for the same reason, savour of the same Lord, who rises up to shatter the earth. And who is the man of sin, the son of perdition, who must be revealed before the Lord's coming, exalting himself above everything that is called God and every object of worship, who will sit in the temple of God and boast himself to be God? In our view he is the Antichrist, as the ancient and the new prophecies teach, and as the apostle John teaches, who says that antichrists have already gone out into the world, forerunners of the Antichrist in spirit, denying that Christ has come in the flesh and dissolving Jesus, that is, in God the Creator. But in Marcion's view I do not know, unless he is the Creator's Christ; for in his view the Creator's Christ has not yet come. But whichever of the two he is, I ask why he comes “with all power and signs and lying wonders.” “Because,” he says, “they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved; and for this reason there will be for them an impulse of deceit, so that they believe the lie, that all may be judged who did not believe the truth but consented to iniquity.” So if he is the Antichrist, as on our view, the Creator will be God, who sends him to drive into error those who did not believe the truth so as to be saved; and the truth and salvation will belong to the same one who avenges them by sending error, that is, to the Creator, to whom such jealousy belongs, to deceive by error those whom he did not win by truth. But if he is not the Antichrist, as on our view, then he is the Creator's Christ, as on Marcion's. And how will it be that he sends the Creator's Christ to avenge his own truth? And even if he agrees about the Antichrist, I would say likewise: how is it that Satan, the Creator's angel, is necessary to him, and is killed by him, though he has to perform the working of deceit for the Creator? In sum, if it is beyond doubt that the angel and the truth and the salvation belong to the one to whom the wrath and the jealousy and the sending of deceit against despisers and deserters belong, and even against those who do not know him (so that Marcion too now gives ground and grants that his god too is a jealous God), who will be angry with better right? I think the one who from the beginning of things laid a foundation in nature for the knowledge of himself by works, benefits, plagues, prophecies, and witnesses, and yet was not known; not the one who was brought forward once, by the single document of the gospel, and that itself uncertain and not openly preaching another god. So to whom vengeance belongs, to him will belong the matter of vengeance: I mean the gospel and the truth and salvation. And to command that one who wants to eat should work is the rule of life of him who ordered that the mouth of the ox treading out the grain be left free.

By the truth of the church we hold that this letter was sent to the Ephesians, not to the Laodiceans; but Marcion was once eager to falsify its title too, as though he were a most diligent investigator in this too. But titles do not matter, since the apostle wrote to all when he wrote to some; certainly, however, preaching in Christ that God to whom the things preached belong. To whom, then, will it belong, according to the good pleasure which he purposed in the mystery of his will, for the arrangement of the fulfilment of the times (to put it as the word sounds in Greek), to “recapitulate” (that is, to bring back to the beginning, or to reckon up again from the beginning) all things in Christ, both those in the heavens and those on earth, if not to him to whom all things will belong from the beginning, even the beginning itself, from whom come both the times and the fulfilment of the times and the arrangement of the fulfilment, on account of which all things are reckoned back to the beginning in Christ? But what beginning has the other god, that is, what starting point, when he has no work? What times without a beginning? What fulfilment without times? What arrangement without fulfilment? In short, what did he ever do on earth long ago, that some long arrangement of times to be fulfilled should be reckoned for reckoning up all things in Christ, even those in the heavens? Nor shall we think that the things done in the heavens, whatever they are, were done by any other than the one by whom all agree the things on earth were done. And if it is not possible for all these things to be counted from the beginning as another's than the Creator's, who will believe that they are reckoned up by another into another Christ, and not by their own author into his own Christ? If they are the Creator's, they must be different from the different god; if different, then opposed. How, then, would opposed things be reckoned up into him by whom, in the end, they are destroyed? For what Christ does the sequel announce, when he says, “that we who hoped beforehand in Christ should be to the praise of his glory”? For who could have hoped beforehand, that is, hoped in God before he came, except the Jews, to whom Christ was foretold from the beginning? So he who was foretold was also hoped for beforehand. And so he refers this to himself, that is, to the Jews, in order to make a distinction when he turns to the nations: “in whom you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel, in which you believed, were sealed with his Holy Spirit of promise.” Of what promise? The one made through Joel: “In the last days I will pour out of my Spirit on all flesh,” that is, on the nations too. So both the Spirit and the gospel will be in that Christ who was hoped for beforehand while he was being foretold. And the Father of glory is he whose Christ is sung in the psalm as the King of glory ascending: “Who is this King of glory? The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory.” From him the spirit of wisdom is prayed for, with whom this kind of spiritual gift too is listed among the seven spirits through Isaiah. He will give enlightened eyes of the heart who also enriched the outward eyes with light, who is displeased at the people's blindness: “And who is blind but my servants?” and, “The servants of God have been blinded.” With him are also the riches of the inheritance among the saints, he who promised that inheritance from the calling of the nations: “Ask of me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance.” He worked his might in Christ by raising him from the dead and seating him at his right hand, subjecting all things to him, he who also said, “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies the footstool of your feet”; since elsewhere too the Spirit says to the Father of the Son, “You have put all things under his feet.” If from these things, which are recognized in the Creator, another god and another Christ are inferred, let us now look for the Creator. Clearly, I think, we find him when he says that they were dead in the sins in which they had walked according to the age of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, who works in the sons of unbelief. But here too Marcion cannot take “the world” for the God of the world. For the created is not like the Creator, the made like the maker, the world like God. Nor will one who is the prince of the power of the ages be called the prince of the power of the air. For the ruler of higher things is never designated from the lower, even if the lower too are counted as his. Nor can he seem to be the worker of unbelief, which he himself rather suffers from both Jews and nations. It is enough, then, if these things do not fall upon the Creator. But if there is one to whom they apply better, the apostle surely knew this better. Who is he? Without doubt the one who hems in the sons of unbelief against the Creator himself, having taken possession of this air, as the prophet reports him saying: “I will set my throne in the clouds; I will be like the Most High.” This will be the devil, whom elsewhere too, if they want the apostle to be read so, we shall recognize as the god of this age. For so he has filled the whole world with the lie of deity. If he had not existed, these things could indeed have looked toward the Creator. And if the apostle had lived in Judaism, when he interposed about sins, “in which we too all once lived,” he does not thereby give us to understand that the lord of sins and prince of this air is the Creator; but because in Judaism he had been one of the sons of unbelief, with the devil working in him, when he was persecuting the church and the Creator's Christ, for this reason he says, “We were of unbelief.” But “by nature” he says, so that the heretic should not argue that the lord of wrath is the Creator because the Creator called the Jews sons. For when he says, “We were by nature children of wrath” (and the Jews are sons of the Creator not by nature but by his choice of the fathers), he referred the children of wrath to nature, not to the Creator. Finally, adding, “as the others too,” who are surely not sons of God, he plainly reckons sins and the lusts of the flesh and unbelief and wrath to the common nature of all men, the devil, however, laying hold of that nature, which he himself had already infected by sowing the seed of sin. “We are his workmanship,” he says, “created in Christ.” For making is one thing and creating another; but he gave both to one. Man is the workmanship of the Creator: so the same one who made him created him in Christ. As regards substance, he made him; as regards grace, he created him. Look also at what hangs together with this: “Remember that you, once the nations in the flesh, who are called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision in the flesh made by hand, were at that time without Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants and their promise, having no hope and without God in the world.” Without what God were the nations, and without what Christ? Surely without him to whom belonged the commonwealth of Israel and the covenants and the promise. “But now,” he says, “in Christ you who were far off have been brought near in his blood.” From what had they been far off before? From what he says above: from the Creator's Christ, from the commonwealth of Israel, from the covenants, from the hope of the promise, from God himself. If this is so, then the nations are now brought near in Christ to those things from which they were then far off. But if we have been brought near in Christ to the commonwealth of Israel, which is in the worship of God the Creator, and to the covenants and the promise and to their very God, it is ridiculous enough that the Christ of another god has brought us from far off to the Creator. The apostle remembered that it had been foretold thus of the calling of the nations, who were to be called from far off: “Those who were far from me have drawn near to my righteousness.” For both the righteousness and the peace of the Creator were announced in Christ, as we have often shown. And so, he says, “He is our peace, who has made both one” (the Jewish, that is, and the Gentile, the near and the far), “having broken down the middle wall of enmity in his flesh.” But Marcion took away “his,” so as to make it “in the flesh” of the enmity, as though the rivalry were with fleshly vice, not with Christ. As I have said elsewhere, so here too, not man of the Marrucini but man of Pontus: why do you deny here the flesh of him whose blood you confessed above? If he made void the law of commandments by his decrees (by fulfilling the law, surely; for “You shall not commit adultery” is now void when it is said, “You shall not even look with lust”; “You shall not kill” is void when it is said, “You shall not even speak evil”; you cannot make a helper of the law into its adversary), “so as to create in himself the two” (he who had made them, creating them too, as also above: “for we are his workmanship, created in Christ”) “into one new man, making peace” (if truly new, then truly a man too, not a phantom; and new, as newly born of a virgin by the Spirit of God), “that he might reconcile both to God” (to the God whom both races had offended, both Jewish and Gentile) “in one body,” he says, “having killed the enmity in it through the cross”: so here too the body in Christ is flesh, which could suffer the cross. So, since he announced peace to those who were near and those who were far off, having together obtained access to the Father, we are no longer strangers and sojourners but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God (of him, surely, from whom we showed above that we had been aliens and far off), “built upon the foundation of the apostles.” The heretic took away “and of the prophets,” forgetting that the Lord placed prophets as well as apostles in the church; unless he feared that our building in Christ might also stand on the foundation of the old prophets, since the apostle himself never ceases everywhere to build us up from the prophets. For where did he get the idea of calling Christ the chief cornerstone, if not from the meaning of the psalm: “The stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner”?