The Doctor and His Instruments

So even his severity is good, because it is just — the judge himself being good, that is, just. And the other qualities are good as well, the ones by which the good work of a good severity runs its course: anger, or jealousy, or harshness. All of them are owed to severity exactly as severity is owed to justice. An age that ought to have been reverent had turned shameless, and that had to be punished. So the qualities that belong to the judge, being themselves free from blame as the judge is, can never be charged against him as a fault. What would be said if you granted that the doctor was necessary and then found fault with his instruments, because they cut, or burn, or amputate, or bind tight — when there could be no doctor worth anything at all without the tools of his trade? [a]

Blame the practitioner, by all means, who cuts badly, amputates clumsily, is reckless with the cautery; and go ahead and call his implements the crude tools of his art. You are behaving just as unreasonably when you allow that God is a judge and at the same time destroy the operations and dispositions by which he does a judge’s work. We are taught about God by the prophets and by Christ, not by the philosophers and not by Epicurus. We who believe that God really did live on earth, and took on the low estate of human form for the sake of man’s salvation, are a long way from thinking as those do who refuse to believe that God concerns himself with anything at all.

This is where the heretics picked up an argument of the following kind: if God is angry, and jealous, and roused, and grieved, then he must be subject to decay, and therefore he must die. As it happens, though, it is part of what Christians believe that God actually did die — and that he is alive forevermore. It is the height of folly to prejudge divine things from human ones, and to suppose that because feelings of this description are found in man’s corrupt condition, feelings of the same kind must therefore exist in God as well. Distinguish the two natures, and give each of them its own senses, which differ as much as their natures require, even though they seem to share the same names. We do read of God’s right hand, and his eyes, and his feet; but these are not to be set beside a human being’s merely because they go under one and the same name. The difference between the divine body and the human one will be great, though their parts pass under identical names; and the difference between the divine soul and the human one will be just as great, though their feelings are called by the same names. In a human being these feelings are made corrupt by the corruptibility of man’s substance, exactly as in God they are made incorruptible by the incorruption of the divine substance.

Do you really believe the Creator to be God? “By all means I do.” Then how do you suppose there is anything human in God, and not that all of him is divine? The one you do not deny to be God, you are admitting is not human; because in confessing him to be God you have already settled that he is beyond question different from every sort of human condition. And though you grant, along with everyone else, that it was man who was breathed into by God and so became a living soul, and not God who was breathed into by man, it is plainly absurd of you to be placing human characteristics in God rather than divine ones in man — dressing God up in the likeness of man instead of man in the image of God.

This, then, is what the likeness of God in man should be taken to mean: that the human soul has the same emotions and feelings as God, though not of the same kind, differing as they do both in their condition and in their outcome, each according to its nature. Then take the opposite feelings — gentleness, patience, mercy, and goodness, the very parent of them all. Why do you judge God’s displays of these in advance from the human ones? For we do not possess them perfectly, since God alone is perfect. And so too with the others, anger and irritation: we are not affected by them in so happy a way, because God alone is truly happy, by reason of his property of incorruptibility. Angry he may possibly be, but not exasperated, and not put in danger. He will be moved, but not overthrown. He must use all his resources, because of all the things that arise: as many feelings as there are causes for them. Anger, because of the wicked; indignation, because of the ungrateful; jealousy, because of the proud; and whatever else stands in the way of the evil. And so too mercy, because of those who go wrong; patience, because of those who will not change; open-handedness, because of those who deserve it; and whatever else the good require. He is moved by all these feelings in that manner peculiarly his own, the manner in which it is deeply fitting that he should be moved; and it is owing to him that man is moved in the same ways, in a manner equally his own.

All this shows that God’s whole arrangement as Judge is a working one, and — to put it in worthier words — the guardian of that universal and supreme goodness of his. That goodness stands clear of the emotions of a judge and is pure in its own condition, and the Marcionites refuse to allow it to be in one and the same God: the goodness that is “raining on the just and on the unjust, and making his sun rise on the evil and on the good” — a generosity no other god whatever practices. True, Marcion has been bold enough to erase this testimony of Christ to the Creator out of the Gospel; but the world itself is inscribed with the goodness of its Maker, and every man’s conscience reads the inscription. [h]

In fact this very long-suffering of the Creator will go toward Marcion’s condemnation — the patience, I mean, that waits for a sinner’s repentance rather than his death; that prefers mercy to sacrifice; that turned away from the Ninevites the ruin already announced against them; that granted Hezekiah’s tears an extension of his life; that gave the king of Babylon his royal state back after he had thoroughly repented. And that mercy, too, which yielded up Saul’s son to the devotion of the people when he was about to die, and freely forgave David when he confessed his sins against the house of Uriah; which restored the house of Israel as often as it condemned it, and spoke comfort to it no less often than reproof.

So do not look at God simply as a judge; turn your attention also to examples of how he acts as the Most Good. You take note of him when he takes vengeance — take note of him likewise when he shows mercy. Set his gentleness on the scale against his severity. When you have found both qualities existing together in the Creator, you will have found in him the very thing that makes you think there is another God.

Finally, come and look into his teaching, his discipline, his commands, his counsels. You will say, perhaps, that human laws lay down rules just as good. But Moses — and God — came before all your Lycurguses and Solons. There is not one later age that does not draw from the earliest sources. At any rate, my Creator did not learn from your god to issue commands like these: You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not give false testimony. You shall not covet what belongs to your neighbor. Honor your father and your mother. And: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

To these first counsels of innocence, chastity, justice and reverence there are added rules of plain human kindness: every seventh year slaves are released into freedom; in the same year the land is spared the plow; room is made for the needy; and the muzzle comes off the mouth of the ox as it treads out the grain, so that it may enjoy the fruit of its own labor lying there in front of it — the point being that kindness first shown in the case of animals should be raised from such beginnings to the refreshment of human beings.

But which parts of the law can I defend as good with more confidence than the very ones heresy has been so eager to fasten on — the statute of retaliation, requiring an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a blow for a blow? There is no hint here of a license for mutual injury; on the whole it is a provision for restraining violence. To a people that was very obstinate, and short on faith toward God, it might well seem a tedious wait, and even past believing, to expect from God the vengeance that the prophet would afterward declare: “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord.” [n]

So in the meantime the committing of a wrong was to be grubbed out by the fear of a retribution that would happen immediately. The permission of that retribution amounted to the prohibition of the provocation, so that a stop might be put to all hot-blooded injury: by allowing the second act the first is prevented through fear, and by deterring the first the second never comes to be committed. The same law achieves another result besides — the readier kindling of the fear of retaliation, by reason of the very savor of passion that is in it. There is nothing more bitter than to undergo the very suffering you have inflicted on someone else.

Again, when the law took something away from what men ate, by pronouncing unclean certain animals that had once been blessed, you should understand this to be a measure for encouraging self-control, and recognize in it a bridle put on the appetite that, while it was eating the food of angels, went on craving the cucumbers and melons of the Egyptians. Recognize in it also a precaution against the companions of the belly — lust and extravagance — which are usually chilled when the belly is chastened. For “the people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play.” Furthermore, so that an eager wish for money might be restrained, as far as it is caused by the need for food, the desire for costly food and drink was taken out of their power. Lastly, so that a man might be more readily trained by God for fasting, he was made used to such foods as were neither plentiful nor sumptuous, and not likely to pamper the appetite of the extravagant. Of course the Creator deserved all the greater blame for taking food away from his own people rather than from the more ungrateful Marcionites.

As for the burdensome sacrifices, too, and the troublesome fussiness of their rituals and offerings, no one should find fault with them, as though God specially required them for himself. For he plainly asks, “What is the point of the multitude of your sacrifices to me?” and “Who required these at your hands?” What he should see in it instead is careful management on God’s part, showing his wish to bind to his own religion a people who were prone to idolatry and transgression, and to do it by the very kind of services in which the superstition of that period consisted — so that he might call them away from it, by asking that it be performed to himself, as though what he wanted was that no sin should be committed in the making of idols.

But even in the ordinary business of life, in dealings at home and in public, right down to the care of the smallest pot, he made a distinct arrangement in every possible way — so that when they ran into these legal instructions everywhere they turned, they might never for a moment be out of the sight of God. For what could do more to make a man happy than to have “his delight in the law of the Lord,” and to “meditate on that law day and night”? [u]

It was not in severity that its Author published this law, but in the interest of the highest good will, which was aiming rather at breaking in the nation’s hardness of heart, and at hewing out by laborious services a loyalty that was as yet untried in obedience. For I am purposely keeping off the hidden senses of the law, the law considered in its spiritual and prophetic bearing, and as teeming with figures of almost every variety and sort. For the present it is enough that it simply bound a man to God, so that no one ought to find fault with it except the man who does not choose to serve God.

To help forward this beneficent and not onerous purpose of the law, the prophets were ordained as well by the self-same goodness of God, teaching commands worthy of God: that men should “cease to do evil, learn to do well, seek judgment, judge the case of the fatherless, and plead for the widow”; be fond of God’s questioning of them; avoid contact with the wicked; “let the oppressed go free”; dismiss the unjust sentence; “deal their bread to the hungry, bring the outcast into their house, cover the naked when they see him, and not hide themselves from their own flesh and kin”; “keep their tongue from evil and their lips from speaking guile, depart from evil and do good, seek peace and pursue it”; be angry and sin not — that is, not persevere in anger or be enraged; “walk not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stand in the way of sinners, nor sit in the seat of the scornful.”

Where does it lead? “See how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity” — meditating, as they do, day and night on the law of the Lord, because “it is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man; better to hope in the Lord than in man.”

And what recompense will a man receive from God? “He shall be like a tree planted by the streams of water, that brings forth its fruit in its season; its leaf also shall not wither, and whatever he does shall prosper.” “He that has clean hands and a pure heart, who has not taken God’s name in vain, nor sworn deceitfully to his neighbor, he shall receive blessing from the Lord, and mercy from the God of his salvation.” “For the eyes of the Lord are upon them that fear him, upon them that hope in his mercy, to deliver their souls from death” — eternal death, that is — “and to nourish them in their hunger,” meaning their hunger after eternal life. “Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers them out of them all.” “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his holy ones.” “The Lord keeps all their bones; not one of them shall be broken.” The Lord will redeem the souls of his servants.

We have brought forward these few quotations out of a mass of the Creator’s Scriptures, and no more, I suppose, are wanted to prove him a most good God; for they indicate well enough both the commands his goodness gives and the payments it makes in advance.

But these cuttlefish — and it was under their figure that the law about things to be eaten prohibited this very kind of fish for food — the moment they find themselves refuted, eject the black venom of their blasphemy, and so spread about in every direction the object each of them plainly has in view, putting forward such assertions and protests as will obscure and tarnish the rekindled light of the Creator’s bounty. We will follow their wicked design even through these black clouds, however, and drag their tricks of dark calumny out into the light. [ab]

They lay to the Creator’s charge, with special emphasis, the fraud and theft of gold and silver that the Hebrews were commanded by him to practice against the Egyptians. Come, unhappy heretic — I call even you as a witness. Look first at the case between the two nations, and then you will form a judgment of the one who gave the command.

The Egyptians put in a claim on the Hebrews for these vessels of gold and silver. The Hebrews assert a counterclaim: that on the account of their respective fathers, attested by the written engagement of both parties, there were due to them the arrears of that laborious slavery of theirs — for the bricks they had so painfully made, and for the cities and country houses they had built. What shall be your verdict, you discoverer of the most good God? That the Hebrews must admit the fraud, or that the Egyptians must admit the compensation? For they maintain that the question has been settled in just this way by advocates on both sides: the Egyptians demanding their vessels, the Hebrews claiming the requital of their labors.

But for all they say, the Egyptians justly renounced their restitution claim then and there, while the Hebrews to this day, in spite of the Marcionites, reassert their demand for even greater damages, insisting that however large their loan of gold and silver was, it would not be compensation enough — not even if the labor of six hundred thousand men were valued at a single small coin a day apiece. Which of the two, though, were the more in number: those who claimed the vessels, or those who lived in the country houses and the cities? And which was the greater: the grievance of the Egyptians against the Hebrews, or the favor the Hebrews had shown them? Were free men reduced to servile labor merely so that the Hebrews might proceed against the Egyptians by an action at law for injuries — or so that their own foremen might sit at their benches and exhibit backs and shoulders shamefully mangled by the fierce application of the scourge? No one would pronounce that the compensation awarded the Hebrews should be made out of a few plates and cups, in all cases the property, no doubt, of still fewer rich men, but out of all the resources of those men and out of the contributions of the whole people.

If, then, the case of the Hebrews is a good one, the Creator’s case must be a good one too — that is, his command; for by it he both made the Egyptians grateful without their knowing it, and gave his own people their discharge in full at the time of their migration, by the scanty comfort of an unspoken requital for their long servitude. What he commanded to be exacted was plainly less than their due. The Egyptians ought to have given the Hebrews their baby boys back as well.