The Voice in the Garden

In the same way, on other points too, you charge him with being fickle and unsteady because of contradictions in his commands. He forbade work to be done on the sabbath, you say, and yet at the siege of Jericho he ordered the ark to be carried around the walls for eight days — which of course means on a sabbath as well. But you are not taking the sabbath law itself into account. What it forbids is human work, not divine. For it says, “Six days you shall labor and do all your work; but the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord your God. On it you shall do no work.” What work? Your own, obviously. The conclusion is that from the sabbath day he is removing the works he had already assigned to the six days — that is, your own works, the human work of daily life. [a]

Now carrying the ark around is plainly not an ordinary daily duty, and not a human one either. It was a rare and sacred act, and, being ordered at that moment by God’s own direct command, a divine one. I could set out in full what it signified, if it were not such a long business to unfold the figures in all the Creator’s proofs — which you would probably refuse to allow anyway. It serves better to have you refuted on plain matters by the simplicity of truth than by clever reasoning.

So here the distinction is clear: what the sabbath prohibits is human labor, not divine. That is why the man who went out and gathered sticks on the sabbath was punished with death. The work he did was his own, and that was what the law forbade. But the men who carried the ark around Jericho on the sabbath did it and went unpunished, because what they carried out was not their own work but God’s, and at his express command.

In the same way, when he forbade a likeness to be made of anything in heaven or on earth or in the waters, he also stated his reasons, since the command bans every material embodiment of a hidden idolatry. For he adds, “You shall not bow down to them or serve them.” The figure of the bronze serpent, though, which the Lord afterwards told Moses to make, gave no ground for idolatry; it was meant to cure the people who were being attacked by the fiery serpents. I say nothing here about what that cure stood for. In the same way the golden cherubim and seraphim were purely ornament, part of the ark’s designed pattern, fitted to it as decoration for reasons entirely removed from the whole business of idolatry, on account of which the making of a likeness is forbidden. Plainly they do not conflict with that prohibition, since they are not found in the kind of likeness the prohibition is aimed at. [f]

We have already spoken about the reasonable purpose behind the sacrifices: they called the people’s homage away from idols and toward God. And if he afterwards rejected that homage, saying, “What are your many sacrifices to me?” he meant nothing else to be understood than this, that he had never really wanted such homage for himself. For he says, “I will not eat the flesh of bulls,” and in another passage, “The everlasting God will neither hunger nor thirst.” He did look with favor on Abel’s offerings, and he smelled a pleasing smell from Noah’s whole burnt offering; but what pleasure could he get from the meat of sheep, or the smell of burning victims? What was accepted before God was the plain and God-fearing mind of the men who offered back what they were receiving from him, food and sweet smell alike; and it was accepted as a mark of respect paid to God, who did not want the thing offered so much as what moved the offering.

Suppose now that some dependent were to offer a rich man or a king — someone who is short of nothing — a very small gift. Will the amount and quality of the gift disgrace the rich man and the king, or will the show of respect give them pleasure? But suppose the dependent presents gifts that do suit the man’s rank, whether on his own initiative or because he was told to, and keeps up the ceremonies a king is owed, and yet does it all without good faith or a clean heart and with no readiness to obey in anything else. Will not that king or rich man say exactly this: “What are your many sacrifices to me? I have had enough of your ceremonies, your festivals, and your sabbaths.”

By calling them yours — because they had been performed to suit the giver’s own will and not the religion God prescribed, since he put them on as his own affair and not as God’s — the Almighty showed in this passage how well fitted to the case, and how reasonable, was his rejection of the very offerings he had commanded to be brought to him.

You will have it, of course, that he is unsteady where persons are concerned: that he sometimes withholds approval where approval is deserved, or else is short of foresight and bestows approval on men who ought rather to be rejected — as though he were either finding fault with his own past verdicts or unable to forecast his future ones. But nothing is so consistent, even for a good judge, as to reject and to choose on the merits of the present moment. Saul is chosen — but he is not yet the man who will despise the prophet Samuel. Solomon is rejected — but by then he has fallen prey to foreign women and become a slave to the idols of Moab and Sidon. [p]

What is the Creator to do in order to escape the censure of the Marcionites? Is he to condemn men in advance, while their conduct is still correct, on account of offenses still to come? But condemning people beforehand, before they have deserved condemnation, is not the mark of a good God. Then is he to refuse to throw out sinners, on account of the good they did earlier? But excusing sins in consideration of former virtues that are no longer practiced is not the mark of a just judge.

Now who among men is so faultless that God could go on choosing him always and never be able to reject him? And who, on the other hand, is so empty of any good work that God could reject him forever and never be able to choose him? Show me the man who is always good, and he will not be rejected; show me the man who is always evil, and he will never be chosen. But if the same man is found at different times pursuing both, and is settled with in both directions by a God who is at once good and a judge, then he is not changing his verdicts out of unsteadiness or lack of foresight. He is paying out what each case deserves, by a decision that never wavers and always looks ahead.

Then there is the repentance that occurs in his dealings, and you twist that with the same perverseness — as though he repented out of fickleness and want of foresight, or on remembering something he had done wrong. For he did actually say, “I repent of having set up Saul as king,” and you take it very much as though his repentance amounted to admitting some evil work or error. But that is not always what it implies. Even in good actions there can be a confession of repentance, made as a reproach and a condemnation of the man who has proved himself ungrateful for a kindness. [s]

Take this case of Saul. The Creator made no mistake in selecting him for the kingdom and endowing him with his Holy Spirit, and he says something about how fine a man Saul was: that he had chosen him exactly as he should, since at that moment Saul was the choicest man there was, so that, as he says, there was no one to match him among the children of Israel. Nor was he in the dark about how Saul would turn out afterwards. No one will bear you out in charging that God with a lack of foresight: since you do not deny that he is divine, you allow that he also sees ahead, for this property belongs to divinity and it is in him. What he did, as I have said, was to load the guilt of Saul still heavier with the confession of his own repentance; and since there is no error and no wrong in his choice of Saul, it follows that this repentance is to be understood as a reproach aimed at another, not as a charge against himself.

Look here, then, you say: “In the case of the people of Nineveh I do find a repentance that incriminates him, where the book of Jonah declares, ‘And God repented of the evil that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it.’” And matching that, Jonah himself says to the Lord, “That is why I fled to Tarshish before: I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness, and that you repent of the evil.” It is a good thing, then, that he set out first the title of the most good God as most patient with the wicked and most abundant in mercy and kindness toward those who acknowledged their sins and wept over them, as the people of Nineveh were doing at that moment. For if the one who bears that title is the Most Good, you will first have to give up that position of yours, that any contact with evil at all is impossible for such a being — that is, for the most good God.

And since Marcion also maintains that a good tree ought not to produce bad fruit, and yet he has himself brought up the “evil” in the passage under discussion — an evil the most good God has no room for — is there any explanation of these “evils” that could make them fit even the Most Good? There is. We say, in short, that evil in the present case does not mean what may be charged to the Creator’s nature, as though he were an evil being, but what belongs to his power as a judge. It is in that sense that he declared, “I create evil,” and, “I am framing evil against you,” meaning not sinful evils but avenging ones. What sort of disgrace attaches to these, agreeing as they do with God’s character as judge, we have explained sufficiently already. Although they are called evils, they are not blameworthy in a judge, and this name of theirs does not show the judge to be evil. In the same way, then, this particular evil is to be understood as one of that class of judicial evils, and along with them to be compatible with a judge. The Greeks too sometimes use the word “evils” for troubles and injuries rather than for wickedness, and that is what is meant in this passage of yours as well.

So if the Creator repented of an evil of that sort — an evil that showed the creature deserved condemnation and ought to be punished for his sin — then in the present case no fault of an incriminating kind will be laid to the Creator’s charge for having decreed, deservedly and worthily, the destruction of a city so full of wrongdoing. What he had justly decreed, then, he decreed with no evil purpose in the decree: it came out of justice, not out of ill will. And yet he gave it the name of “evil,” because of the evil and the deserving that are bound up in the suffering itself.

Then, you will say: “If you excuse the evil under the name of justice, on the ground that he had justly determined destruction against the people of Nineveh, then on that very argument he must be blameworthy for having repented of an act of justice, which surely is not a thing to be repented of.” Not at all, is my reply. God will never repent of an act of justice. What remains now is that we should understand what God’s repentance means. A man most often repents on remembering a sin, and occasionally even because some good action of his has met with no thanks; with God this is never the case. Since God neither commits sin nor condemns a good action, to that extent there is no room in him for repenting of either a good deed or an evil one.

And this point is settled for you even in the scripture we have quoted. Samuel says to Saul, “The Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from you today and has given it to a neighbor of yours who is better than you,” and Israel will be divided into two parts, “for he will not turn back, nor repent; he does not repent as a man does.” By this definition, then, the divine repentance takes a different form in every case from a man’s, in that it is never to be regarded as the result of want of foresight, or of fickleness, or of any condemnation of a good work or an evil one. What form, then, will God’s repentance take? It already shines out clearly, if you avoid referring it to human conditions. It will mean nothing else than a simple change of an earlier purpose; and that is admissible without any blame even in a man, and much more in God, whose every purpose is faultless. And in Greek the word for repentance, metanoia, is formed not from the confession of a sin but from a change of mind, which in God, as we have shown, is governed by the way circumstances turn out.

It is high time now, so that I may deal with every objection of this kind, that I went on to the explaining and clearing up of the other petty points, weak spots and inconsistencies, as you reckoned them. God calls out to Adam, “Where are you?” — as if he did not know where he was; and when Adam alleged that the shame of his nakedness was the reason he had hidden, God asked whether he had eaten from the tree, as if he were in doubt. Not at all. God was neither uncertain that the sin had been committed nor ignorant of where Adam was. It was entirely right to summon the offender, who was hiding himself because he knew what he had done, and to bring him out into his Lord’s presence — not merely by calling out his name, but with a stinging blow struck at the sin he had committed that very moment. [ab]

For the question ought not to be read in a merely questioning tone, “Where are you, Adam?” but with a weighty and urgent voice, and with the ring of an accusation: “Adam! Where are you?” As much as to say: you are no longer here, you are lost. So the voice is the utterance of one who is at once rebuking and grieving.

But of course some corner of paradise had escaped the eye of the one who holds the universe in his hand as though it were a bird’s nest, and for whom heaven is a throne and earth a footstool — so that before he summoned him out he could not see where Adam was, either while he was lurking or while he was eating the forbidden fruit! The wolf, or the paltry thief, does not escape the notice of the keeper of your vineyard or your garden. And God, I should think, with his keener vision, from on high was unable to overlook anything that lay beneath him. Foolish heretic, turning up your nose at so fine an argument for God’s greatness and man’s instruction!

God put the question with an appearance of uncertainty in order that even here he might prove man to be the subject of a free will, in the alternative of a denial or a confession, and might give him the chance to acknowledge his transgression freely and so far to lighten it. In the same way he asks Cain where his brother is, just as though he had not yet heard Abel’s blood crying out from the ground — so that Cain too, by the same power of the will, might have the chance to deny it of his own accord and to that degree make his crime worse; and so that examples might be supplied to us of confessing sins rather than of denying them. Even then, in other words, the teaching of the good news was already being set on foot: “By your own words you will be counted righteous, and by your own words you will be condemned.”

Now although Adam, by reason of his standing under law, was liable to death, hope was still kept for him by the Lord’s saying, “See, Adam has become like one of us” — that is, in view of the man’s future taking up into the divine nature. And what follows? “And now, in case he reaches out his hand and takes from the tree of life as well, and eats, and lives forever.” By inserting in this way the particle of present time, “and now,” he shows that the prolongation he had made of man’s life was for a time, and for the present. That is why he did not actually curse Adam and Eve: they were candidates for restoration, and their confession had already lightened their load. Cain, though, he not only cursed; and when Cain wanted to pay for his sin by dying, God even forbade him to die, so that he had to bear the weight of that prohibition on top of his crime. This, then, will turn out to be the ignorance of our God, an ignorance put on for this reason, that the man who had gone wrong should not be left ignorant of what he ought to do.

Coming down to the case of Sodom and Gomorrah, he says, “I will go down now and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry against it that has come to me; and if not, I will know.” Well, was he uncertain here too, out of ignorance, and wanting to find out? Or was this the necessary tone of the utterance, carrying a threatening sense and not a doubtful one, under the appearance of an inquiry? And if you make merry over God’s “going down,” as though he could not have carried out his judgment except by coming down, take care that you do not strike your own god with as hard a blow. For he too came down to accomplish what he wanted.