Hidden in God, Not From Him

Since our heretic is so fond of his pruning knife, it does not surprise me when single syllables get cut out by his hand; whole pages are usually what he practices his erasing on. The apostle says that to himself, “less than the least of all the saints, this grace was given” — the grace of making plain to everyone “what is the fellowship of the mystery which through the ages has been hidden in God, who created all things.” The heretic erased the word in and made the clause run: “(what is the fellowship of the mystery) which for ages has been hidden from the God who created all things.” The forgery, though, is glaringly absurd. [a]

For the apostle goes straight on to draw a conclusion from his own statement: “so that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God might be made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places.” Whose principalities and powers does he mean? If the Creator’s, how does it come about that a God like him could have wanted his wisdom put on display to the principalities and powers, but not to himself? Surely no principalities could have understood anything at all without their own sovereign Lord. Or if the apostle left God out of this sentence on the ground that he, as their chief, is counted among them, then he would have said plainly that the mystery had been hidden from the principalities and powers of the one who created all things — putting him among their number. But since he says it was hidden from them, he has to be understood as meaning that it was plain to him. So the mystery was not hidden from God. It was hidden in God, the Creator of all things, from his principalities and powers. For “who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?”

Caught in this trap, the heretic probably altered the passage so that he could say his god wanted to make known to his own principalities and powers the fellowship of his own mystery — a mystery of which God, the maker of all things, had been ignorant. But what was the good of forcing this ignorance onto the Creator, who was a stranger to the higher god and far enough removed from him, when even the higher god’s own servants had known nothing about him either? The Creator, at any rate, knew the future perfectly well. Then why was that one thing not known to him too, when it had to be revealed under his own heaven and on his own earth? So this yields a confirmation of what we laid down earlier. Since the Creator was bound to find out that hidden mystery of the higher god sooner or later, then even on the supposition that the true reading is Marcion’s — “hidden from the God who created all things” — the apostle ought to have finished the sentence like this: “so that the manifold wisdom of God might be made known to him, and after that to the principalities and powers of God, whoever he may be, with whom the Creator was going to share their knowledge.” Read that way, in line with what it is actually driving at, the erasure in this passage is unmistakable.

Now, for my own part, I want to take up with you the apostle’s figures of speech. What figures could the newcomer god have found in the prophets that would fit him? “He led captivity captive,” says the apostle. With what weapons? In what battles? From the wrecking of what country? From the sack of what city? What women, what children, what princes did the conqueror throw into chains? For when Christ is sung by David as “girded with his sword on his thigh,” or by Isaiah as “taking away the spoils of Samaria and the strength of Damascus,” you hammer him out into a real, literal soldier, plain to the eye. Learn now, then, that his armor and his warfare are spiritual, since you have already worked out that the captivity is spiritual — and learn further that this belongs to him as well, because the apostle took the mention of the captivity from the same prophets who supplied him with his commands.

“Putting away lying,” he says, “let each of you speak the truth with his neighbor.” And again, using the very words the Psalm uses for its meaning, he says, “Be angry, and do not sin,” and, “Do not let the sun go down on your anger.” “Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness” — because in the Psalm it is written, “With the holy man you will be holy, and with the perverse you will be perverse,” and, “You shall put away the evil from among you.” Again: “Come out from among them, and touch no unclean thing; separate yourselves, you who carry the vessels of the Lord.” The apostle says further, “Do not get drunk on wine, in which is excess” — a command suggested by the passage where the men who tempted the consecrated into drunkenness are rebuked: “You gave my holy ones wine to drink.” The same ban on drink was laid on the high priest Aaron and his sons, “when they went into the holy place.” And the command to “sing to the Lord with psalms and hymns” comes fittingly from the one who knew that people who “drank wine with drums and harps” were blamed by God. Now, when I find out which God these commands belong to, whether in the seed or in the full growth, I have no trouble knowing whose the apostle is either.

But he declares that “wives ought to be subject to their husbands.” What reason does he give for it? “Because,” he says, “the husband is the head of the wife.” Tell me, Marcion: does your god build up the authority of his own law on the Creator’s work? And that is a small thing beside what comes next, for he actually draws from the same source the standing of his Christ and his church. He says, “just as Christ is the head of the church”; and again, in the same way, “he who loves his wife loves his own flesh, just as Christ loved the church.” You see how your Christ and your church are set alongside the Creator’s work for comparison. How much honor is paid to the flesh under the name of the church! “No one,” says the apostle, “ever yet hated his own flesh” — except Marcion, of course, all by himself — “but feeds it and cares for it, just as the Lord does the church.” But you are the one man who does hate his own flesh, since you rob it of its resurrection. It will be only right for you to hate the church too, because it is loved by Christ on exactly the same footing. Yes — Christ loved the flesh just as he loved the church. For no man loves the picture of his wife without taking care of it, honoring it, hanging a wreath on it. The likeness shares in the honor given to the real thing.

I will now try, from where I stand, to prove that the same God belongs to the man and to Christ, to the woman and to the church, to the flesh and to the spirit — and I will do it with the apostle’s help, since he takes up the Creator’s own instruction and even adds a comment on it: “For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery.” In passing, it is enough for me that the Creator’s works are great mysteries in the apostle’s judgment, however cheaply the heretics hold them. “But I am speaking,” he says, “of Christ and the church.” He says that to explain the mystery, not to break it up. He shows us that the mystery was pictured in advance by the one who is also the author of the mystery. Now what is Marcion’s view? The Creator could not possibly have supplied figures to a god he did not know — or, if he did know him, to an enemy of his own. The higher god, in fact, ought to have borrowed nothing at all from the lower. He was bound rather to wipe him out.

“Children should obey their parents.” Now although Marcion erased the clause that follows, “which is the first commandment with a promise,” the law still says plainly, “Honor your father and your mother.” Again, the apostle writes: “Parents, bring up your children in the fear and instruction of the Lord.” For you have heard what was said to people long ago: “You shall tell these things to your children, and your children in the same way to their children.” What good are two gods to me, when the training they give is one and the same? If there have to be two, I intend to follow the one who taught the lesson first.

But since our struggle is against “the rulers of this world,” what a crowd of Creator-gods there must be! Why should I not press the point right here? He ought to have named only one “ruler of this world,” if he meant the Creator to be the single being to whom all the powers he mentioned earlier belonged. Again, when in the verse just before it he tells us to “put on the whole armor of God, so that we may be able to stand against the tricks of the devil,” does he not show that everything he names after the devil really belongs to the devil — “the principalities and the powers, and the rulers of the darkness of this world” — which we too assign to the devil’s authority? Otherwise, if “the devil” means the Creator, who will the devil be in the Creator’s own management of things? Since there are two gods, must there be two devils as well, and a whole crowd of powers and rulers of this world? But how is the Creator a devil and a god at the same time, when the devil is not both god and devil at once? For either both of them are gods, if both of them are devils; or else the one who is God is not also devil, just as the one who is the devil is not god.

In fact I would like to know by what act of slander the word devil can be applied to the Creator at all. Perhaps he slandered some plan of the higher god — the sort of thing he was treated to himself by the archangel, who really did lie for that purpose. For he did not forbid our first parents a taste of that miserable little tree out of any fear that they would turn into gods; his prohibition was meant to keep them from dying after the transgression. As for “the spiritual wickedness,” that did not stand for the Creator either, because of the extra description the apostle adds: “in the heavenly places.” The apostle knew perfectly well that “spiritual wickedness” had been at work in heavenly places, when angels were trapped into sin by the daughters of men. But how did it come about that the apostle fell back on ambiguous descriptions, and on I do not know what obscure riddles, in order to run the Creator down — when he showed the church such steadiness and plainness of speech in “making known the mystery of the good news, for which he was an ambassador in chains,” and that because of the freedom with which he preached? He even asked the Ephesians to pray to God that this open-mouthed way of speaking might go on being given him.