The Stolen Slave

Here is another rule for him. Everything that belongs to God ought to be as reasonable as it is natural. I look for reason in his goodness, because nothing can properly be called good except what is good on good grounds; still less can goodness itself be found in anything unreasonable. An evil thing with something reasonable about it will pass for good more easily than a good thing stripped of all reason will escape being taken for evil. Now I deny that the goodness of Marcion’s god is reasonable, and my first ground is this: it set out to bring salvation to a human creature who was a stranger to him. [a]

I know what they will bring up in reply: that this is precisely the primary and perfect kind of goodness, the kind poured out freely and of its own accord on strangers, with no bond of friendship to require it — on the principle that we are told to love even our enemies, who are strangers to us for that very reason. But since from the first he took no interest in man, who was a stranger to him from the first, by that very neglect he settled in advance that he had nothing to do with a creature belonging to someone else. Besides, the rule about loving a stranger or an enemy comes after the command to love your neighbor as yourself. That command comes out of the Creator’s law, and even you are bound to accept it, since Christ did not cancel it but confirmed it. You are told to love your enemy and the stranger so that you may love your neighbor the better. Requiring what is not owed is an increase laid on top of the kindness that is owed. But what is owed comes first, as the principal thing and the worthier of the two, with the kindness that is not owed following as its attendant and companion.

So the first step in making the divine goodness reasonable is that it should show itself on its proper object, in justice; only at a second step does it go out to a stranger, by a righteousness that goes beyond the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees. How then does the second step get credited to a god who fails at the first, since he has no proper object in man, and so makes his goodness defective at that very point? And how could a defective kindness, with no proper object of its own to spend itself on, overflow onto someone else’s? Settle the first step, and then make your case for the next. Nothing can be claimed as reasonable when it is out of order; reason itself least of all can do without order in anyone.

Suppose the divine goodness does begin at the second stage of its reasonable working — that is, with the stranger. Even then that second stage will not hold together as reasonable if it is damaged in some other way. Goodness at its second stage, the goodness shown to the stranger, will only count as reasonable when it works without wronging the man who has the first claim. It is justice, before anything else, that makes any goodness reasonable. So goodness will be reasonable at its principal stage, on its proper object, if it is just; and in the same way it will be able to look reasonable toward a stranger, if it is not unjust. But what sort of goodness is it that shows itself in an act of wrong, and shows itself so on behalf of a creature belonging to someone else? A kindness that did harm might perhaps be reckoned reasonable up to a point, if it were done for one of your own household. But by what rule can an unjust kindness, shown on behalf of a stranger — a man to whom not even an honest kindness is legally owed — be defended as reasonable?

For what is more unrighteous, more unjust, more dishonest, than to do a favor to another man’s slave in this fashion: to take him away from his master, to claim him as somebody else’s property, and to set him on against his master’s life — and, to make the business more outrageous still, to do it while he is still living in his master’s house, still eating out of his master’s granary, still trembling under his master’s whip? A liberator of that kind — I would almost say a kidnapper — would be convicted even in a human court. And that is exactly the character of Marcion’s god: swooping down on a world that is not his, snatching man away from his God, the son from his father, the pupil from his tutor, the slave from his master — so as to make him disloyal to his God, undutiful to his father, ungrateful to his tutor, worthless to his master.

If reasonable kindness makes a man like that, what, I ask you, would unreasonable kindness make of him? I can think of nothing more shameless than a man who is baptized to his own god in water that belongs to another; who stretches out his hands to his own god toward a heaven that belongs to another; who kneels to his own god on ground that belongs to another; who gives thanks to his own god over bread that belongs to another; and who hands out, as alms and acts of love, for his own god’s sake, gifts that belong to another God. Who, then, is this god of theirs, so good that a man turns evil through him, and so favorably disposed that he sets that other God — man’s own rightful Lord — against man?

But as God is eternal and reasonable, so, I take it, he is perfect in every way. “Be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.” Prove, then, that your god’s goodness is a perfect one too. That it is imperfect has already been shown well enough, since it turns out to be neither natural nor reasonable. But the same conclusion can be reached by another road. It is not merely imperfect; it is actually feeble and weak and worn out. It fails to take in the whole number of the objects it works on, and does not show itself in all of them. Not all are brought into a state of salvation by it: the Creator’s own subjects, Jew and Christian alike, are left out. [g]

Now when the greater part are lost like this, how can that goodness be defended as perfect? It does nothing in most cases, something in a few, nothing at all in many; it gives way to destruction and goes shares with ruin. And if so many are to miss salvation, then the greater perfection will lie not with goodness but with ill will. For as it belongs to goodness to save, so it belongs to ill will not to save. But since this goodness saves only a few, and so leans rather to the side of not saving, it will show itself more perfect by withholding help than by giving it. Nor will you be able to credit your god with goodness by comparison with the Creator, when he fails everybody. Whoever you call in to judge the question, the divine character you put up for a verdict must be that of a dispenser of goodness — if such a title can be made out at all — and not of a squanderer of it, which is what you claim your god to be. So long as you prefer your god to the Creator on the simple ground of his goodness, and so long as he claims that quality as wholly and solely his own, he ought not to have run short of it toward anyone.

Still, I do not want to prove Marcion’s god imperfect in goodness on the ground that the greater number are lost. I am content to show the imperfection from this: that even the ones he does save turn out to have only half a salvation. They are saved as far as the soul goes, but lost in the body, which on his account does not rise again. Where does this halving of salvation come from, if not from a failure of goodness? What better proof of a perfect goodness could there be than the recovery of the whole man? Damned whole by the Creator, he ought to have been restored whole by the most merciful god.

I should have thought that by Marcion’s own rule it is the body that is baptized, the body that is denied marriage, the body that is savagely tortured when it confesses Christ. And although sins are charged to the body, they are preceded by the soul’s guilty craving. Indeed the first movement of sin has to be put down to the soul, with the flesh acting as its servant. Once released from the soul, the flesh sins no more. So in this business goodness is unjust, and imperfect as well, since it abandons to destruction the more harmless of the two substances — the one that sins by going along rather than by willing. And even granting that Christ did not put on the reality of flesh, as your heresy likes to assume, he still stooped to take on its appearance. Surely, then, some regard was owed to flesh from him, because of this pretended assumption of it.

Besides, what is a man but flesh? There is no doubt that the Maker of human nature named him from the bodily element and not the breathing one. “And the LORD God formed man out of the dust of the ground” — not out of spiritual stuff; that came afterward, from the divine breath: “and man became a living soul.” So what is man? Made of dust, past all doubt. And God placed him in paradise because he had moulded him into being, not breathed him into being — a piece of workmanship in flesh, not in spirit.

That being so, with what face will you argue for the perfect character of a goodness that fell short, not in some one detail of man’s deliverance, but across its whole reach? If it is full grace and solid mercy to bring salvation to the soul alone, then this present life we live whole and entire is the better one; and to rise again only in part will be a punishment, not a release. The proof of a perfect goodness would be that a man, once rescued, should be brought out of the house and power of the malignant deity into the keeping of the supremely good and merciful God.

Poor dupe of Marcion, the fever has hold of you, and your aching flesh raises a crop of every kind of brier and thorn. And it is not only the Creator’s thunderbolts that leave you exposed, or his wars and plagues and heavier blows; it is his creeping insects too. In what sense do you suppose yourself set free from his kingdom, when his flies are still crawling across your face? If your deliverance is still to come, why is it not present as well, so that it might be perfectly done? Our own standing is very different in the eyes of the one who is the Author, the Judge, and the injured Head of our race. You put your god on show as merely good; but you cannot prove him perfectly good, because you have not been perfectly delivered by him.

On this question of goodness, then, the outline of our argument has shown that it fits deity in no way at all: it is neither natural, nor reasonable, nor perfect, but wrong and unjust and unworthy even of the name of goodness. As far as consistency of character goes, a being said to have a goodness like that — and to have it not in any qualified way but simply and solely — cannot properly be regarded as God. For here another question opens up: whether God ought to be regarded as a being of pure goodness, to the exclusion of all those other qualities, feelings and emotions which the Marcionites take away from their god and hand over to the Creator, and which we for our part acknowledge as fitting the Creator too — but only because we hold him to be God. On that ground we shall deny the title of God to anyone in whom everything is not found that befits the divine being. [n]

Suppose Marcion wanted to take some member of the school of Epicurus and give him the title of God under the name of Christ, on the ground that what is happy and incorruptible neither has trouble itself nor causes trouble to anything else. It was while chewing over this doctrine of divine unconcern that Marcion stripped his god of all severity and of all the force of a judge. Very well: he then had one of two duties. Either he should have carried the idea through to an unshakable and listless god — and in that case what would he have had in common with Christ, who caused trouble to the Jews by what he taught and to himself by what he felt? Or else he should have admitted that his god was open to the same emotions as anyone else — and in that case what business had he with Epicurus, who was no friend either to him or to Christians?

Consider: a being who for ages past lay quiet, taking no trouble in all that time to make himself known by any work at all, comes after so long an interval to feel a concern for man’s salvation — by his own will, of course. Did he not by that very fact become open to the shock of a new act of will, and so plainly open to every other emotion as well? And what act of will has no craving behind it? Who wishes for what he does not crave? Care, moreover, will be another companion of will. Who will wish for something and crave to have it without also caring to get it? So when Marcion’s god felt both a will and a craving for man’s salvation, he certainly did bring concern and trouble on himself and on others. That is what Marcion’s account implies, however Epicurus may object.

For he raised up an adversary against himself in the very thing his will and craving and care were aimed at — whether that was sin or death — and above all in their Tyrant and Lord, the Creator of man. Further, nothing is ever carried through against a rival without itself taking on the look of a rival. In fact, in willing and craving and caring to deliver man, Marcion’s god runs into a rival in the act itself: both in the one from whom he works the deliverance, since of course he means the liberation as a move against him, and in the things out of which the deliverance is worked, since the liberation is intended for the advantage of certain other things.

And rivalry must have its own train of attendant passions in waiting, against whatever it is set on: anger, quarrelling, hatred, contempt, indignation, bile, disgust, displeasure. Now since all these emotions are present to rivalry; and since the rivalry that arises in setting man free stirs them up; and since this deliverance of man is a work of goodness — it follows that this goodness is worth nothing without its endowments, that is, without the very feelings and emotions by which it carries out its purpose against the Creator. So not even here can it be ruled unreasonable, as though it lacked the feelings and emotions proper to it. All this we shall have to press much further when we come to plead the Creator’s case, and there these same things will come in for our condemnation.

But it is enough here that the extreme perversity of their god is proved out of the bare account of his lonely goodness — a goodness in which they refuse to let him have the movements of mind they find fault with in the Creator. If he feels no rivalry, no anger, no sense of damage or injury, being one who declines to exercise judicial power, then I cannot see how any system of discipline can hold together in him, least of all a complete one. How is it possible for him to issue commands if he does not mean to enforce them, or to forbid sins if he does not mean to punish them, but means instead to decline the office of judge, as a stranger to all severity and judicial correction? Why does he forbid the doing of what he does not punish once it is done? It would have been far more proper for him not to forbid what he did not mean to punish, than to punish what he had not forbidden. Indeed, he ought even to have permitted what he was going to prohibit so unreasonably as to attach no penalty to the offense. For as things stand, whatever is forbidden without any penalty attached is quietly permitted. [r]

Besides, he only forbids what he does not like to see done. He is thoroughly listless, then, since he takes no offense at the doing of what he dislikes to have done — although displeasure ought to be the companion of a will that has been violated. Now if he is offended, he ought to be angry; if angry, he ought to punish. Punishment is the proper fruit of anger; anger is the debt owed by displeasure; and displeasure, as I said, is the companion of a violated will. But he inflicts no punishment. Therefore he takes no offense.

He takes no offense; therefore his will is not wronged, even though the thing he did not want done is done. And so the transgression is now committed with his will’s consent, since whatever does not offend the will is not committed against the will. But if this is to be the principle of the divine excellence or goodness — to be unwilling that a thing be done, and to forbid it, and yet not to be moved when it is done — then our reply is that he has already been moved once, when he declared himself unwilling. It is pointless for him not to be moved by the accomplished fact after being moved at the mere possibility of it, when he willed that it should not be done. He forbade it by not willing it.

So did he not perform a judicial act when he declared himself unwilling and issued his prohibition? For he judged that the thing ought not to be done, and he formally pronounced that it was to be forbidden. By this point, then, he is already playing the judge. If it is unbecoming for God to exercise a judicial function — or becoming only so far as to let him state his unwillingness and pronounce his prohibition — then he may not punish an offense when it is committed either.

But nothing is so unworthy of the divine being as to leave unpunished what he has disliked and forbidden. In the first place, he owes chastisement to whatever sentence or law he publishes, to uphold his authority and to keep men submitting to it. In the second place, hostile opposition is bound to follow whatever he has disliked to have done, and forbidden because he disliked it. What is more, it would be a more unworthy course for God to spare the wrongdoer than to punish him — and most of all in the most good and holy God, who is not fully good on any other terms than as the enemy of evil, and that to such a degree that he displays his love of good by his hatred of evil, and completes his defense of the one by wiping out the other.