Marcion's Two Gods

Whatever I have written against Marcion in the past is, from this moment, no longer to be taken into account. This is a new work, taking the place of the old one. My first attempt was put together too hurriedly, and I later replaced it with a fuller treatise. That one I lost before I had finished publishing it, through the dishonesty of a man who was then a brother and afterward left the faith. He had copied out a portion of it — full of mistakes — and then published what he had. So a corrected work became necessary, and the occasion of a new edition led me to add a good deal to the treatise. This present text, then, is the third, since it supersedes the second; but from now on it is to be counted the first rather than the third. That is why this issue of the tract needs a preface — so that no reader is thrown if he happens to run across one of the other versions of it that are scattered about. [b]

The sea they call the Euxine contradicts itself in its own nature and lies in its own name. You would never call it hospitable from where it lies. It is cut off from our more civilized waters by the stain that hangs on the barbarism of its shores. The fiercest nations live there, if you can call it living, when life is spent in wagons. They have no fixed home. Their way of life is raw and has nothing in it out of which civilization could grow. They indulge their lusts without restraint, and for the most part naked. When they want secret sex they hang their quivers on the yoke of the cart, to warn off anyone curious or careless enough to come near — that is how shamelessly they prostitute their weapons of war. They cut up the dead bodies of their parents along with their sheep and eat them at their feasts; and anyone who has not died in a way that made him food for others is thought to have died an accursed death. Their women are not softened into modesty by their sex. They bare the breast and hang their battle-axes from it, and would rather fight than marry.

Their climate is as harsh as they are. The daylight there is never clear and the sun is never glad. The sky is one unbroken cloud, the whole year is winter, and the only wind that blows is the angry north. Water melts only over a fire. The rivers do not run, for the ice. The mountains pile up under drifts of snow. Everything is numb, everything stiff with cold. Nothing there is warm but that ferocity which gave the stage its plots — the sacrifices of the Taurians, the loves of Colchis, the tortures of the Caucasus.

And yet nothing in Pontus is as barbarous or as sad as this: that Marcion was born there. He is filthier than any Scythian, more restless than a Sarmatian in his wagon, more inhuman than a Massagete, more brazen than an Amazon, darker than the cloud, colder than the winter, more brittle than the ice, more treacherous than the Danube, more jagged than the Caucasus. Why not say it — the true Prometheus, God Almighty, is torn to pieces by Marcion’s blasphemies. Marcion is more savage than even the beasts of that barbarous country. What beaver was ever such a castrator as the man who has abolished marriage? What Pontic mouse ever gnawed like the man who has gnawed the Gospels to shreds? You have produced, Euxine, a monster more believable to philosophers than to Christians. Diogenes the Cynic used to walk about at midday with a lantern looking for a man; Marcion has put out the light of his faith and so lost the God he had found.

His own followers will not deny that he once held the same faith we do; a letter in his own hand proves it. So from his case, from now on, a heretic can be defined as a man who abandons what came first and afterward chooses out for himself what was not there before. For to the degree that what was handed down first and from the beginning is held to be the truth, to that same degree whatever is brought in later will be counted heresy. But another short treatise of mine will defend that position against heretics, who ought to be refuted without any consideration of their doctrines at all, on the ground that they are heretics by the sheer newness of their opinions. For now, so far as any argument is to be allowed, I will begin by setting out my opponent’s rule of faith, so that no one can miss what our main contention is going to be. I do this for the moment because our short way with novelty, if it were called in to rescue us on every occasion, might be taken for a lack of confidence.

The heretic from Pontus brings in two Gods, like the twin Symplegades of his own shipwreck: one whom it was impossible for him to deny, our Creator, and one whom he will never be able to prove, his own god. The unhappy man took the first prompting of his notion from a plain saying of our Lord, which has to do with human beings and not with divine ones — the saying that disposes of the examples of a good tree and a rotten one: “The good tree does not bear rotten fruit, and the rotten tree does not bear good fruit.” What that means is that an honest mind and good faith cannot produce evil deeds, any more than an evil disposition can produce good ones. But Marcion — like a good many people nowadays, especially those with a leaning toward heresy — brooded sickly over the question where evil comes from, and the sheer disorder of his inquiry blunted his perception. Then he found the Creator saying, “I am the one who creates evil.” Having already concluded, from other arguments that satisfy any warped mind, that God is the author of evil, he now applied to the Creator the figure of the rotten tree bearing bad fruit — that is, moral evil — and assumed there had to be another god to match the good tree producing its good fruit. And then, finding in Christ a different disposition, as it were, one of plain and unmixed kindness, unlike the Creator’s, he readily argued that in his Christ a new and foreign divinity had been revealed. With a little yeast he leavened the whole lump of the faith, souring it with the acid of his own heresy. [i]

He also had a certain Cerdon to help him in this blasphemy — which made the two of them all the readier to think they saw their two gods perfectly clearly, blind though they were. The truth is that they had never seen the one God with sound faith. To a diseased eye even a single lamp looks like many. So of his two gods, the one he was forced to acknowledge he destroyed by slandering his character over the matter of evil; the other, the one he worked so hard to invent, he built up, laying his foundation on the principle of good. The headings under which he arranged these two natures will appear as we refute them.

The chief question — in fact the whole question — is a question of number: whether two Gods may be admitted by poetic license, if it must come to that, or by a painter’s fancy, or by that third route which I have to add now, the crookedness of heretics. But the Christian truth has stated the principle flatly: God does not exist if he is not one. We say that because we hold, and rightly, that whatever is not what it ought to be does not exist at all. If you want to be sure that God is one, ask what God is, and you will find that he cannot be anything but one. So far as a human being can frame a definition of God, here is one that every man’s conscience will grant as well: God is the supremely great, existing in eternity, unbegotten, unmade, without beginning and without end. A condition like that has to be credited to the eternity that makes God supremely great, since it is for just this purpose that eternity is in God at all; and so on through his other qualities, so that God is supremely great in form, in reason, in force and in power. [m]

Now everyone agrees on this much — nobody will deny that God is in some sense the supremely great, except the man prepared to state the opposite, that God is something less, so as to deny God by robbing him of what makes him God. So what must be true of the supremely great himself? Surely this: that nothing is equal to him, that there is no second supreme greatness. For if there were, he would have an equal; and if he had an equal, he would no longer be the supremely great, since the condition, the law (so to speak) that allows nothing to be equal to the supremely great, would have been overthrown. So the being who is supremely great has to be one of a kind, precisely by having no equal, and so by not ceasing to be supremely great. He will exist on no other terms than the terms on which he has his being — that is, by being absolutely one of a kind.

Since, then, God is the supremely great, our Christian truth has rightly laid it down as its first principle: God does not exist if he is not one. Not that we doubt he is God when we say he is not, if he is not one; we simply define the one we thoroughly believe in as being that without which he would not be God — that is, supremely great. And the supremely great has to be one of a kind. This one-of-a-kind being, then, will be God: God on no other terms than as supremely great, supremely great on no other terms than as having no equal, and having no equal on no other terms than by being one of a kind. Whatever other god you bring in, you will not be able to hold on to his divinity under any other form than by ascribing to him too what belongs to being God — both eternity and supremacy over all. So how can two supreme greatnesses exist side by side, when it is the very property of the supremely great to have no equal, a property that belongs to one alone and cannot possibly exist in two?

But someone may argue that two supreme greatnesses can exist, distinct and separate, each in its own department, and may even bring in as an example the kingdoms of this world, which are many in number and yet each supreme in its own region. A man who argues that way is assuming that human arrangements always compare with divine ones. But if that kind of reasoning is to be tolerated at all, what is to stop us bringing in — I will not say a third god or a fourth — as many gods as there are kings on the earth? What is in question here is God, and it is his chief property to admit of no comparison with himself. So nature herself, even without an Isaiah, or rather God speaking through Isaiah, will ask in protest, “Who will you compare me to?” Human affairs may perhaps be compared with divine ones, but not with God. God is one thing; what belongs to God is another. [q]

And again: you who use the example of a king as a supreme power, take care that you can use it properly. A king may be supreme on his throne, next after God, but he is still below God; and when he is set beside God he will be knocked off that supremacy, which passes over to God. That being so, how will you use as your example, in a comparison with God, an object that fails at everything a comparison requires? Why is it that supreme power among kings evidently cannot be shared out, but is single and one of a kind, and yet an exception is made in the case of the very one who is King of kings and who — because his power is so overwhelming and every other rank is subject to him — is the summit, so to speak, of all rule?

Take even the rulers of that other form of government, where men preside one by one in a shared authority. If you take their small change of royalty, so to call it, and compare them at every point until it becomes clear which of them is superior in the substance and the powers of kingship, the supreme majesty is bound to be strained off to one man alone, all the others being gradually removed and shut out of supreme authority by the result of the comparison. So although supreme authority, spread out among several hands, looks like something shared, in its own powers, nature and condition it is single. It follows that if two gods are compared, as two kings and two supreme authorities, the whole of the authority has to be granted, by the very meaning of the comparison, to one of the two; because it is clear from his own superiority that he is the supreme one, his rival now beaten and shown to be not the greater, however great he is. And once his rival has failed like that, the other is alone in power, standing in a kind of solitude of his own pre-eminence. So the conclusion we arrive at on this point is unavoidable: either we deny that God is supremely great, which no sensible man will let himself do, or we say that God has no one else to share his power with.

But on what principle did Marcion confine his supreme powers to two? Let me ask first: if there are two, why not more? If number is compatible with the substance of deity, the richer you make it in number the better. Valentinus was more consistent, and more generous. Having once imagined two divinities, Bythos and Sige, he poured out a swarm of divine beings, a litter of no fewer than thirty Aeons, like the sow of Aeneas. Whatever principle refuses to admit several supreme beings must reject even two, for there is already plurality in the very lowest number after one. After unity, counting begins. And by the same token, the principle that could admit two could admit more; after two, a crowd begins, now that one has been exceeded. In short, we feel that reason herself, by that very boundary, forbids belief in more gods than one. For the same rule that lays down one God and not two is the rule that says God must be a being to whom, as the supremely great, nothing is equal — and a being to whom nothing is equal must be one of a kind. [s]

But further: what use or advantage is there in supposing two supreme beings, two powers on a level? What numerical difference could there be, when two equals do not differ from one? A thing that is the same in two is one thing. Even if there were several equals, they would all be just as much one, because as equals they would not differ from one another. So if of two beings neither differs from the other, since both of them are by the supposition supreme, both of them gods, then neither is better than the other; and having no pre-eminence, their being counted as two has no reason behind it.

Number in the deity ought to be consistent with the highest reason, or else the worship of God is brought into doubt. Look at it this way. Suppose I had two Gods in front of me, both of them supreme and equal to each other, and I worshiped them both. What would I be doing? I should be very much afraid that so much homage would be judged superstition rather than piety. Since they are equal, and each of them is included in the other, I could serve them both acceptably in only one; and by doing exactly that I would be attesting their equality and their unity, provided I worshiped them reciprocally, each in the other, because in the one both are present to me. And if I worshiped one of the two, I would be just as conscious of seeming to pour contempt on the uselessness of a numerical distinction that was superfluous, because it marked no difference. In other words, I would think it the safer course to worship neither of these two Gods than to worship one of them with a scruple of conscience, or both of them to no purpose.

So far our discussion has run as if Marcion made his two gods equal. While we have been maintaining that God is to be believed in as the one and only supremely great, with every possibility of equality shut out of him, we have handled these topics on the assumption of two equal Gods. Still, by teaching that no equals can exist under the law of the supremely great, we have said enough to establish that two equals cannot exist. For the rest, we know perfectly well that Marcion makes his gods unequal: one of them judicial, harsh, mighty in war; the other mild, placid, and simply good and excellent. So let us look with the same care at this side of the question too — whether diversity can hold two gods, since equality failed to. Here again the same rule about the supremely great will protect us, since it settles the whole condition of divinity. Challenging my opponent, and in a manner of speaking laying a hand on him and holding him, since he does not deny that the Creator is God, I object, quite fairly, that he has no room for any diversity in his gods; because, having once confessed that they stand on the same footing, he cannot now pronounce them different. Not that human beings under the same title may not differ greatly, but because the divine being can neither be called God nor believed to be God except as the supremely great. [t]

So since he is obliged to acknowledge that the God he does not deny is the supremely great, it is inadmissible for him to attribute to the supremely great any such reduction as would put him under another supreme being. For he stops being supreme the moment he becomes subject to anyone. Besides, it is not in God’s character to stop being anything that belongs to his divine standing — his supremacy, say. At that rate the supremacy would be in danger even in Marcion’s more powerful god, if it could be devalued in the Creator. So when two gods are pronounced two supreme greatnesses, it must follow that neither of them is greater or less than the other, neither of them higher or lower than the other. If you deny that the one you call inferior is God, you deny that this inferior being is supreme. But when you confessed that both gods were divine, you confessed that both were supreme. You will not be able to take anything away from either of them; you will not be able to add anything. By allowing their divinity, you have denied their diversity.