Real Flesh and a Real Birth

Now, in this argument of yours, you suppose that we can be answered out of the Creator’s own angels — as though they dealt with Abraham and Lot in a phantom state, in flesh that only seemed to be flesh, and yet really talked and ate and carried out the work they had been sent to do. To begin with, you will not be permitted to take your examples from the acts of the very God you are demolishing. The better and more perfect you make your own god out to be, the less any example can suit him that is drawn from the God he differs from entirely — and without that difference he would not be better or more perfect at all. Second, you must understand that we will not grant you that the flesh in the angels only seemed to be flesh. It was flesh of a true and solid human substance. For if, on your own terms, it cost him nothing to display true sensations and true actions in a merely apparent flesh, it would have been far easier for him to attach the true substance of flesh to those true sensations and actions, since he is the proper maker and shaper of flesh in the first place. But your god — perhaps because he had produced no flesh at all — was quite right to bring in the mere phantom of a thing whose reality he had been unable to produce. [a]

My God, on the other hand, shaped what he had taken out of the dust of the ground into flesh of the true quality, though it did not yet issue from the seed of a marriage; and he was just as able to fit angels out with flesh of whatever material he pleased. This is the God who built the world itself out of nothing, into bodies so many and so various — and did it at a word. And really: if your god promises men the true nature of angels one day (for he says, “They will be like the angels”), why should my God not have fitted the true substance of men onto angels, from whatever source he drew it? You cannot even tell me, in reply, where that angelic nature is to come from on your side. So it is enough for me to lay this down as fitting and proper to God — that a thing set before three senses at once, sight and touch and hearing, should be true. It is harder for God to lie than to produce real flesh out of any material whatever, even without the means of birth. There are other heretics as well who hold that if the flesh in the angels was really human, it ought to have been born of flesh. We have a sure answer for them too: it was truly human flesh, and yet it was not born. Truly human, because God is truthful and can neither lie nor deceive, and because such beings cannot be dealt with by people in a human way except in human substance. Unborn, because none of them could take flesh by being born — only Christ could, so that by his own birth he might remake our birth, and by his death dissolve our death as well, rising again in the very flesh in which he was born so that he could die.

So on that occasion he appeared himself, along with the angels, to Abraham in real flesh — flesh that had not yet undergone birth, because it was not yet going to die, though even then it was learning how to deal with men. And it was still more fitting in the angels’ case. They were never given the charge of dying for us, and so they did not take even a term of leave in the flesh by being born, since they were not going to lay it down again by dying. But wherever they got it from, and however they afterwards put it off altogether, they never pretended it was unreal flesh. The Creator “makes his angels spirits, and his ministers a flame of fire” — as truly spirits as truly fire — and in the same way he truly made them flesh as well. So we can remind ourselves, and remind the heretics too, that the God who once made angels into men has promised that one day he will make men into angels.

So, since you are not allowed to fall back on any examples from the Creator — they are outside the case, and have reasons of their own — I would like you to state for yourself what your god’s purpose was in displaying his Christ in something other than real flesh. If he despised the flesh as earthly and, in your own phrase, stuffed with dung, why did he not take its likeness into the same contempt? No honor is owed to the image of a thing that has no honor of its own. As the reality is, so is the likeness. [i]

But how could he have dealt with men at all except in the likeness of human substance? Why not in the reality of it, then, so that his dealings might be real, since he was under the necessity of having them? And how much better that necessity would have been spent in serving faith than in serving a stage trick! The god you have made is a poor thing for this very reason: he could not display his Christ except in the effigy of something unworthy — and something that was not even his own. In some cases it is proper to use unworthy things, provided they are ours; just as it is quite improper to use things, however worthy, if they are not ours. Why, then, did he not come in some worthier substance, and above all in his own, so as not to look as though he could not manage without an unworthy one belonging to somebody else?

My Creator dealt with man by means of a bush and fire, and afterwards by a cloud and a pillar of fire, and used bodies made out of the elements when he represented himself. Those displays of divine power are proof enough that God did not need the services of false flesh, or even of real flesh. And yet, if we look at it steadily, there is no substance at all that is worthy to become God’s clothing. Whatever he is pleased to put on, he makes worthy of himself — only there must be no lie in it. How does it come about, then, that your god thought the truth of the flesh a disgrace and its falsehood none? But he honored the flesh by his pretense of it. Then how great a thing that flesh must be, when even a phantom of it was a necessity to the superior god!

Marcion took up all these illusions of an imaginary body in his Christ with one aim: that Christ’s birth too should be left without any evidence from his human substance, and that every prediction which treated him as capable of human birth, and therefore of flesh, could then be handed over to the Creator’s Christ instead. But in this our heretic from Pontus acted like a fool. As if it were not easier to believe that flesh in a divine being was unborn than that it was untrue — and the way to that belief had in fact been largely prepared already by the Creator’s angels, who dealt with men in flesh that was real, though unborn. Indeed, the notorious Philumena persuaded Apelles and the others who broke away from Marcion to believe exactly that: Christ really did carry a body of flesh about with him, only he did not get it by birth; he borrowed it from the elements. [n]

Now since Marcion was afraid that if the flesh were believed the birth would be believed along with it, plainly the one who seemed to be a man was taken to have been truly born. A woman had called out, “Blessed is the womb that carried you, and the breasts you nursed at!” And how else could they have said that his mother and his brothers were standing outside? But we shall see more of this in its proper place. Certainly, when he also called himself the Son of man, he was admitting beyond any doubt that he had been born. I would rather refer all these points to an examination of the Gospel. Still, as I have said already, if the one who seemed to be a man had at all costs to pass for someone born, it was pointless for him to suppose that belief in his birth could be carried through by the device of an imaginary flesh. What was gained by that not being true which was taken to be true, whether it was his flesh or his birth? Or if you say, let human opinion look after itself — then you are honoring your god under cover of a deception, since he knew himself to be something other than what he had made men think of him. In that case you might just as well have assigned him a birth that only seemed to be one, and not hung the whole question on this one point. Foolish women, after all, sometimes think themselves pregnant when they are only swollen, either from their monthly bleeding or from some other illness. And of course, having put on nothing but the mask of a body, it was his duty to act his phantom play out from its opening scene, or he would have fumbled his part at the very beginning of the flesh.

Naturally you have rejected the lie of a birth and produced real flesh instead! And no doubt, for a God, even a real birth is the most shameful thing there is. Come on, then: deliver your closing speech against the most sacred and honored works of nature. Rail at everything you are yourself. Demolish the origin of flesh and life. Call the womb a sewer for that noble animal — the workshop, that is, in which a human being is manufactured. Enlarge on the foul and shameful agonies of giving birth, and then on the filthy, troublesome, contemptible discharges of the labor itself. But when you have dragged all this down into disgrace, so as to pronounce it unworthy of God, birth will still be no worse for him than death, infancy no worse than the cross, punishment no worse than nature, being condemned no worse than the flesh. If Christ truly suffered all that, being born was the smaller thing for him. If Christ suffered by a lie, as a phantom, then he could have been born by a lie as well.

These are Marcion’s chief arguments for making out another Christ, and I think we have shown plainly enough that they are entirely beside the point, once we teach how much better it suits God that the condition in which he displayed his Christ should be real rather than false. Since he was “the truth,” he was flesh; since he was flesh, he was born. What this heresy attacks is confirmed the moment the means of the attack are destroyed. So if he is to be reckoned as being in the flesh because he was born, and born because he is in the flesh and is no phantom, then it follows that he must be acknowledged as the very Christ of the Creator himself — the one whom the Creator’s prophets foretold as coming in the flesh, and by way of human birth.

Now go ahead and challenge us first, as you always do, to consider Isaiah’s description of Christ, insisting that it fits at no point. To begin with, you say that Isaiah’s Christ will have to be called Emmanuel; and then, that he takes the wealth of Damascus and the spoils of Samaria against the king of the Assyrians. But the one who has come was neither born under that name nor ever took part in any campaign. I must remind you, though, that you ought to look at what hangs together with each of the two passages. For the interpretation of Emmanuel is added at once — God with us — so that you have to consider not only the name as it is pronounced, but its meaning too. The sound of it, Emmanuel, is Hebrew, and belongs to the prophet’s own nation; but the meaning of the word, God with us, is made common property by the translation. Ask yourself, then, whether this name God-with-us, which is Emmanuel, is not in constant use of Christ, on the ground that Christ has brought light to the world. And I suppose you will not deny it, since you yourself admit that he is called God-with-us, that is, Emmanuel. [aa]

Or if you are so foolish that, because among you he goes by the title God-with-us and not Emmanuel, you refuse to grant that the one whose name it properly is to be called Emmanuel has come — as though that were not the same name as God-with-us — then look at the Hebrew Christians, and at the Marcionites too: they name him Emmanuel when they mean him to be called God-with-us. Just so, every nation, by whatever word it says God-with-us, has called him Emmanuel, filling out the sound with its sense. Now since Emmanuel is God-with-us, and God-with-us is Christ, who is in us — for “as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ” — Christ is as properly contained in the meaning of the name, which is God-with-us, as he is in the pronunciation of the name, which is Emmanuel. And so it is plain that the one foretold as Emmanuel has now come, because what Emmanuel means has come: that is, God with us.