Adam the First Heretic

The chance to bring this little work out again — I told the story of its earlier fortunes in the preface to Book One — has given me the opportunity, in handling the question of two Gods against Marcion, to treat each of them separately, with a section and a description of his own, as the subject itself divides: to settle of the one god that he has no existence at all, and to maintain of the Other that he is God, and worthily so. So far I keep step with the heretic from Pontus, who has been pleased to let the one in and to shut the other out. For he could not put up his lying structure without pulling down the structure of truth. To build what he wanted, he first had to undermine something else. But that is like putting up a house without laying in any materials of your own. [a]

The argument ought to have been aimed at one point only: that anyone who displaces the Creator is no god. Then, once the false god had been ruled out by settled rules that fix in advance what the one and only perfect Godhead must be, no question about the true God could have remained. The proof of his existence would have been plain — plain in the very failure of any evidence for another god. Plainer still would have been the point about the honor he must be held in, past all argument: that he is to be worshiped rather than put on trial, served with reverence rather than picked over — or at the least feared for his severity. For what did a man need more thoroughly than care for the true God, on whom, so to speak, he had stumbled, since there was no other?

So the way is clear now for us to look at Almighty God, the Lord and Maker of the universe. His greatness, I think, is shown in this: that from the beginning he made himself known. He never hid; he always shone out — long before Romulus, let alone Tiberius. There is only one exception: the heretics, and they alone, do not know him, for all the trouble they take over him. And that is exactly why they suppose some other god has to be brought in. They find it easier to fault the God whose existence is so plain than to deny him, because they take all their thinking about God from what the senses hand them. [d]

It is as if a blind man, or one whose eyes swim, were to make up some other sun of a milder and healthier ray, because he cannot see the one that is there to be seen. There is one sun, man, and it governs this world; and even when you think otherwise of it, it is the best thing there is and it does its work. It may strike you as too fierce and harmful, or perhaps as too murky and unwholesome, but it is still true to the laws of its own being. You cannot see through those laws; and you would be no more able to bear the rays of any other sun, if there were one, however great and good. Now you, who are half-blind where the lesser god is concerned — what do you make of the higher One? The truth is that you go easy on your own weakness and never stretch yourself to the test. You hold that God is known certainly, beyond doubt, and therefore known enough, the moment you have found out that he exists — though you know him only on the side where he chose to leave his evidence.

You do not even deny God as a man who knows. You handle him as a man who does not know. And then you accuse him as though you did know — when, if you really knew him, you would never accuse him, and never pick him over at all. You give him his name, but you deny what the name is: the greatness that is called God. You will not admit that it is the kind of greatness which, if a man could know it from every side, would not be greatness.

Isaiah, so early, and with an apostle’s clearness, saw what would be in heretical hearts and asked: “Who has known the mind of the Lord? Who has been his counselor? With whom did he take counsel? … Or who taught him knowledge, and showed him the way of understanding?” The apostle agrees with him and cries out: “Oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!” His judgments unsearchable, since they are the judgments of God the Judge; his ways past finding out, since they take in an understanding and a knowledge that no one has ever shown him — unless perhaps these critics of the divine nature have, the men who say that God ought not to have been this, and ought rather to have been that. As if anyone knew what is in God, except the Spirit of God.

What is more, having the spirit of the world, and “in the wisdom of God not knowing God by wisdom,” they think themselves better advised than God — for as the wisdom of the world is foolishness with God, so the wisdom of God is folly in the world’s estimate. But we know that “the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” And so God is most of all great when he is small to a man; most of all good when he is not good in a man’s judgment; most of all one when he seems to a man to be two or more.

Now if from the very first the natural man, “not receiving the things of the Spirit of God,” judged God’s law to be foolishness and therefore did not keep it; and if, as the next consequence, because he had no faith, “even what he seems to have has been taken away from him” — the grace of paradise, that is, and the friendship of God, by which he might have known all that belongs to God, had he gone on obeying — then what is surprising if this man, cut back to his material nature and driven out to the labor of working the ground, handed on in that very labor, bent low and pulled earthward as it was, that earthy spirit of the world to his whole race, which is natural through and through, and heretical, and does not receive the things that belong to God?

Or who will hesitate to declare that Adam’s great sin was heresy, since he committed it by a choice of his own will rather than of God’s? Except that Adam never said to his fig tree, Why have you made me like this. He admitted that he had been led astray, and he did not hide the one who led him. He was a very crude heretic. He was disobedient — but he did not slander his Creator, nor lay the blame on the Author of his being, whom from the first day of his life he had found so good and so excellent, and whom, it may be, he had made his own judge from the very start.

So as we come to examine the God who is known, and the question arises in what character he is known to us, it will be right to begin with his works, which come before man. Then his goodness, discovered at once along with himself and so established and settled in advance, will give us the sense by which to understand how the order of things that followed came about. And Marcion’s disciples may perhaps be able, once they recognize the goodness of our God, to learn how well it suits a divine being — and to learn it on the very grounds by which we have proved it unworthy in the case of their god. For this very thing, which is the main plank of their system of knowledge, Marcion did not find in any other god; he extracted it for himself out of his own god. [j]

The first goodness, then, was the Creator’s: God was unwilling to stay hidden forever — in other words, unwilling that there should be nothing by which God might become known. For what is so good as the knowledge of God and the enjoyment of him? Now this did not yet appear to be good, because as yet there was nothing for it to appear to; but God foreknew what good would in the end appear, and so he set his own perfect goodness to work for the accomplishment of the good that was coming. It was no sudden goodness, no windfall kindness and no burst of stirred-up feeling, of the sort that must be dated simply from the moment it began to act. For if it made its own beginning when it began to act, then it had no beginning of its own at the time it acted. But once a first act had been performed by it, the ordering of times and seasons began; and to mark them off and keep count of them, the stars and lights of heaven were set in their order. “Let them be,” God says, “for seasons, and for days, and years.”

Before that course of time, then, the goodness that created time had no time; and before the beginning that this same goodness set going, it had no beginning. Having therefore no order of a beginning and no manner of time, it will be reckoned to have an age immeasurable in extent and endless in duration. Nor will it be possible to take it for a sudden or an incidental or an impulsive feeling, since there is nothing to give ground for such an account of it — that is, no sequence of time at all. It must therefore be counted an eternal property, born in God and everlasting, and worthy of a divine being for that reason; and from this point on it puts to shame the benevolence of Marcion’s god, who comes after — I will not say after all beginnings and times — but after the very malice of the Creator, if malice could ever be found in goodness.

So the goodness of God, having provided man for the pursuit of the knowledge of himself, added this to its own first announcement: that it prepared him a dwelling first — the vast structure of this world to begin with, and afterward the vaster one — so that he might practice and go forward in his testing on a great stage as well as on a smaller one, and be promoted from the good God had given him, that is, from his high place, to God’s best, a greater dwelling still. In this good work God employs a most excellent servant, his own Word. “My heart,” he says, “has poured out my most excellent Word.” [m]

Let Marcion take his first lesson here on the noble fruit of this truly most excellent tree. But like the clumsiest of country louts he has grafted a good branch onto a bad stock. The shoot of his blasphemy will never be strong; it will wither along with the man who planted it, and that is how the nature of the good tree will be shown. Look at the whole result: how fruitful the Word was. God gave the order and it was done; God also saw that it was good — not as though he were ignorant of the good until he saw it, but because it was good he therefore saw it, and honored it, and set his seal on it, and finished off the goodness of his works by granting them that regard. So God blessed what he had made good, to commend himself to you as whole and perfect, good in word and in deed alike. As yet the Word knew no cursing, because he was a stranger to doing harm. We shall see later what reasons required this of God too.

Meanwhile the world was made up of all things good, showing plainly how much good was being got ready for the one it was all provided for. And who indeed was so worthy to live among the works of God as the one who was his own image and likeness? That image was worked out by a goodness more at work than usual, with no commanding word but with a friendly hand, and led up to by an utterance almost coaxing: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Goodness spoke the word. Goodness shaped man out of the dust of the ground into so great a substance of flesh, built out of one material with so many qualities. Goodness breathed into him a soul that was not dead but living. Goodness set him over all things, to enjoy them and rule them and even give them their names. On top of this, Goodness attached delights to man, so that while he owned the whole world he might linger among higher pleasures, moved across into paradise — out of the world and into the church. The same Goodness provided a helper fit for him as well, so that there should be nothing in his lot that was not good; for, he said, that the man be alone is not good. He knew very well what a blessing that sex would be to him — the sex of Mary, and of the church too.

As for the law that you find fault with and twist into a matter for quarreling: Goodness laid it on man with his happiness in view, so that he might hold fast to God and not show himself an abject creature rather than a free one, nor sink to the level of the other animals under him, who were free of God’s commands and left unsubjected because they were beneath his notice. Man alone could boast that he alone was worth receiving laws from God; and as a reasoning creature, able to understand and to know, he was to be held within the bounds of a reasoning freedom, under the One who had put all things under him. To secure the keeping of this law, Goodness also took thought and added a sanction: “On the day you eat of it, you will surely die.” It was a most kindly act to point out in this way where breaking it would lead, so that ignorance of the danger should not encourage carelessness about obeying. And since it was given as a reason before the law was laid down, it also amounted to a motive for keeping the law afterward — that a penalty hung on breaking it; a penalty which the One who set it was still unwilling to have incurred. Learn, then, the goodness of our God in these things and up to this point: learn it from his excellent works, from his kind blessings, from his generous gifts, from his gracious provisions, from his laws and his warnings, so good and so merciful.

Now then, you dogs, whom the apostle puts outside, and who yelp at the God of truth — let us come to your various questions. These are the bones of contention that you are forever gnawing. [u]

If God is good, and knows the future, and is able to turn evil aside, why did he let man — the very image and likeness of himself, and, by the origin of his soul, his own substance too — be deceived by the devil and fall out of obedience to the law into death? For if he had been good, and so unwilling that such a disaster should happen; and if he knew the future, so as not to be ignorant of what was coming; and if he had power enough to prevent it, then that outcome would never have come about, since those three marks of divine greatness make it impossible. But since it has come about, the opposite proposition is most certainly true: that God is to be reckoned neither good, nor knowing the future, nor powerful. For as no such outcome could have happened had God been what he is reputed to be — good, knowing, and mighty — so this outcome has actually happened, because he is not such a God.

In reply we must first make good those qualities in the Creator that are called into question: his goodness, his foreknowledge, and his power. But I will not linger long over this heading, for Christ’s own rule comes to our aid at once: proofs are to be had from works. The Creator’s works testify at once to his goodness, since they are good, as we have shown; and to his power, since they are mighty, and indeed come out of nothing. And even if they were made out of some existing matter, as some will have it, they are out of nothing even so, because they were not what they now are. In short, they are great because they are good; and God is mighty as well, since all things are his own — which is why he is Almighty. And what shall I say of his foreknowledge, which has as many witnesses as it had prophets to inspire? Though after all, what claim to foreknowledge do we look for in the Author of the universe, when it was by this very thing that he foreknew all things as he appointed them their places, and appointed them their places as he foreknew them? Take sin itself. If he had not foreknown it, he would not have proclaimed a warning against it under the penalty of death.

Now if there were in God such qualities as must have made it both impossible and improper for any evil to happen to man, and yet evil did occur, then let us consider man’s condition as well, and ask whether it was not in fact rather the cause of what could not have come about through God. I find, then, that man was made free by God, master of his own will and his own power; and nothing indicates the presence of God’s image and likeness in him so well as this make of his nature. For it was not by his face, or by the lines of his body, varied as they are in human nature, that he expressed his likeness to the form of God. He was stamped in that substance which he drew from God himself — the soul, that is, which answered to the form of God — and in the freedom and power of his will.

This standing of his was confirmed by the very law God then laid on him. For a law would not be laid on one who had not the power to render the obedience that is owed to a law; nor again would the penalty of death be threatened against sin, if contempt of the law were impossible to a man in the freedom of his will. So in the Creator’s later laws too you will find, when he sets good and evil, life and death, before a man, that the whole course of discipline is arranged in commands, with God calling men away from sin and threatening and urging them; and this on no other ground than that man is free, with a will either for obedience or for resistance.