Matter Made Equal with God

He argues that Matter is less than God, and inferior to him, and for that reason different from him — and for the same reason not a thing you may set beside him, since he is the greater and higher being. My answer is a rule: what is eternal and unborn is incapable of any lessening or inferiority. That is the very thing which makes even God as great as he is, subject to none and inferior to none — greater, rather, and higher than everything. For everything that is born, or that comes to an end, and so is not eternal, lies open to both an end and a beginning, and therefore admits qualities that cannot be said of God — I mean lessening and inferiority, since such things are born and made. And God, for that same reason, cannot take on these accidents, because he is simply unborn, and unmade as well. And yet that is Matter’s condition too. [a]

So of the two beings that are eternal, as being unborn and unmade — God and Matter — the mode of their shared condition is identical. Each equally possesses what admits neither of lessening nor of subjection, that is, the property of being eternal. Therefore, we say, neither of them is less or greater than the other, neither of them inferior or superior to the other; they stand level in greatness, level in loftiness, level on that same ground of complete and perfect happiness which eternity is reckoned to consist of.

Now we must not hold opinions like the pagans. When they are forced to acknowledge God, they insist on having other gods below him. But divinity has no degrees, because it is unique; and if divinity turns out to be in Matter as well — Matter being equally unborn, unmade and eternal — then it must be present in both alike, since in no case can it be inferior to itself. How, then, will Hermogenes find the nerve to draw his distinctions, and so put Matter under God — an eternal under the Eternal, an unborn under the Unborn, an author under the Author? For Matter dares to say:

“I too am first. I too am before all things. I too am that out of which all things come. We have been equals; we have been together — both alike without beginning, both without end, both without an author over us and without a God. What God is this, then, who puts me under a power that is my contemporary and my co-eternal? If he is the one called God, then I have a name of my own that is divine as well. Either I am God, or he is Matter — because each of us is the thing that neither of us is.” Do you still suppose, then, that Hermogenes has not made Matter God’s equal, for all his pretending that it is inferior to him?

In fact he goes further. He actually prefers Matter to God, and puts God under it, when he will have it that God made everything out of Matter. For if God drew his resources from Matter for making the world, Matter is already found to be the superior of the two, since it furnished him with the means of getting his work done; and God is thereby plainly made subject to Matter, whose substance he could not do without. For no one fails to need what he uses, and no one fails to be subject to the thing he needs, precisely so as to be able to use it. And again, no one who uses what belongs to somebody else fails to be the inferior of the man whose property he uses; and no one who lends out what is his own for another’s use fails to be, in that respect, the superior of the man he lends it to. [e]

On that principle Matter itself was certainly not in want of God. It was Matter that lent itself to God — rich and plentiful and generous as it was — and God who was in want of it, being, I suppose, too small and too weak and too unskilled to form what he wanted out of nothing. A magnificent service it did him, to be sure: it gave him at last the means of being known for God and called Almighty — except that he is Almighty no longer, since he is not strong enough for this, to bring all things out of nothing. And Matter did itself a good turn as well, in getting its own self acknowledged alongside God as God’s equal — better still, as his assistant. There is only this drawback, that Hermogenes is the one man who has found this out, apart from the philosophers, those patriarchs of every heresy. The prophets knew nothing of it, nor the apostles so far, nor, I imagine, even Christ.

He cannot say that God used Matter for his creative work as its owner, since he could not have been the owner of a substance that was his own equal. Well then, perhaps what he enjoyed was a title held at somebody else’s pleasure — a permission, not a lordship — and held on such terms that although Matter was evil, he put up with using an evil substance. That, of course, would be owing to the restraint of his own middling power, which left him unable to create out of nothing; it would not follow from his power at all. For if, being God, he had had any power whatever over Matter, knowing it to be evil, he would first have turned it into something good — as its owner, and as the good God — so as to have something good to use instead of something bad. But being undoubtedly good, and yet not the owner besides, he used such power as he had, and so showed how far he was compelled to give way to the condition of Matter, which he would have put right had it been his. [g]

This is the answer that must be given to Hermogenes when he maintains that it was by right of ownership that God used Matter: that he had no right to it at all, on the plain ground that he had not made it himself. Then, on your own terms, evil must come from God himself, since he is — I will not say the author of evil, because he did not form it, but — the one who permitted it, as having it in his power. And if Matter should turn out not to belong to God at all, being evil, it follows that when he used what belonged to another, he used it either on sufferance, because he needed it, or by seizing it, because he was the stronger. For there are three ways of coming by what belongs to somebody else: by right, by leave, by force — in other words, by ownership, by the owner’s permission, by violence. Now ownership is out of the question, so Hermogenes must choose which of the other two suits God. Did he, then, make everything out of Matter by permission, or by force? But in truth, would God not have determined more wisely that nothing at all should be created, than that it should be created by the mere sufferance of another, or by violence — and out of a substance that was evil at that?

Even if Matter had been goodness at its most perfect, would it not have been just as unbecoming in him to have had his eye on another’s property, however good it was, to get his purpose done by means of it? So it was absurd enough of him, in the interest of his own glory, to create the world in a way that gives away his obligation to a substance which belonged to somebody else — and one that was not even good. [j]

“Was he to make everything out of nothing, then,” Hermogenes asks, “so that evil things themselves would have to be laid to his will?” Great, in all honesty, must be the blindness of our heretics, which leaves them arguing in such a way that they either insist on believing in another God, supremely good, because they take the Creator to be the author of evil; or else they set up Matter alongside the Creator, so as to draw evil from Matter and not from the Creator. And yet there is no god at all who is free of that awkward position, none who can escape so much as the appearance of being the author of evil — no god, that is, who has (I will not say made, but at any rate) permitted evil to be made, by some author or other and from some source or other.

So Hermogenes should be told at once, although I put off to another place my distinction about what evil is, that even he has got nowhere with this contrivance of his. For see how God is found to be, if not the author of evil, then at any rate a party to it, seeing that with all his extreme goodness he put up with evil in Matter before he made the world, when, being good and evil’s enemy, he ought to have corrected it. Either he was able to correct it and was unwilling, or else he was willing and, being a weak God, was not able. If he was able and yet unwilling, he was evil himself, for having favored evil; and so he now lays himself open to the charge of evil, because even if he did not create it, still, since it would not be in existence had he been against its existing, he must himself have caused it to exist at the moment when he refused to will that it should not. And what is more shameful than that? When he willed that to exist which he was himself unwilling to make, he acted against his very self, since he was both willing that a thing should exist which he was unwilling to make, and unwilling to make a thing which he was willing should exist — as though what he willed were good and what he refused to be the maker of were evil, both at once. What he judged to be evil by not creating it, he also declared to be good by permitting it to exist. By bearing with evil as though it were a good thing, instead of stamping it out, he proved himself to be its promoter: criminally, if he did it by his own will; disgracefully, if under compulsion. God must be either the servant of evil or the friend of it, since he kept company with evil in Matter — worse, since he did his work out of the evil in it.

But after all, by what proofs does Hermogenes persuade us that Matter is evil? He will find it impossible not to call that thing evil to which he imputes evil. Now the principle we lay down is that what is eternal cannot possibly admit of lessening and subjection, so as to be reckoned inferior to another being eternal along with it. So we now say that evil is not even compatible with it, since it is incapable of subjection, from the fact that it cannot in any way be subject to anything, because it is eternal. And since it is evident on other grounds that what is eternal, as God is, is the highest good — which is also why he alone is good, being eternal, and therefore good, being God — how can evil be at home in Matter, which, since it is eternal, must then be believed to be the highest good as well? Otherwise, if what is eternal proves to be capable of evil too, the same will be believable of God, to his discredit; so that Hermogenes has been so anxious to get evil away from God for no good reason, since evil must be compatible with an eternal being anyway, once it has been made compatible with Matter, as he makes it. [l]

But as the argument now stands, since what is eternal can be reckoned evil, evil must prove to be unconquerable and impossible to overcome, being eternal. In that case it is for nothing that we labor “to put away evil from among us”; in that case, too, God gives us such a command and such a rule for nothing; worse, in that case God has appointed judgment for nothing at all, when he means, of course, to inflict punishment unjustly. But suppose, on the other hand, that there is to be an end of evil. Its chief, the devil, will “go away into the fire which God has prepared for him and his angels,” having first been “thrown into the bottomless pit.” “The revealing of the children of God” will have “set creation free” from evil — creation that had been “made subject to futility.” The cattle, restored to the innocence and wholeness of their created nature, will be at peace with the wild beasts, and little children will play with snakes. The Father will have put his Son’s enemies under his feet, as being the workers of evil. If in this way an end is compatible with evil, then of necessity a beginning is compatible with it too — and Matter will turn out to have had a beginning, by virtue of having an end as well. For whatever things are set down to evil’s account share evil’s condition.

Come now, let us suppose Matter to be evil — very evil, in fact, and evil by nature, of course, just as we believe God to be good, and very good, and good by nature in the same way. Now a nature has to be regarded as sure and fixed: as persistently fixed in evil, in Matter’s case, as it is unmoved and unchangeable in good, in God’s. Because plainly, if a nature admits of change from evil to good in Matter, it can be changed from good to evil in God. [q]

Here somebody will say: “Then will children not be raised up to Abraham out of the stones? Will broods of vipers not bring forth the fruit of repentance? And will children of wrath fail to become sons of peace, if a nature cannot change?” Your appeal to examples like these, my friend, is a thoughtless one. Things that owe their existence to birth — stones and vipers and human beings — have no bearing on the case of Matter, which is unborn; for their nature, by having a beginning, may also have a stopping point. But bear in mind that Matter has been settled once for all as eternal, being unmade and unborn, and therefore supposedly of a nature that cannot change and cannot decay — and this from Hermogenes’ own opinion, the one he brings up against us when he denies that God was able to make anything out of himself, on the ground that what is eternal is incapable of change, because it would lose — so the opinion runs — what it once was, in becoming by the change what it was not, if it were not eternal. But as for the Lord, who is also eternal, he maintained that he could not be anything other than what he always is.

Very well: I will adopt that settled opinion of his, and by means of it refute him. I lay the same charge against Matter. Out of Matter, evil as it is — very evil, indeed — good things have been created, “very good” ones at that: “And God saw that they were good, and God blessed them” — because of their very great goodness, obviously, and certainly not because they were evil, or very evil. Change, therefore, is admissible in Matter; and if that is so, Matter has lost its standing as something eternal; in a word, its beauty has decayed in death. But eternity cannot be lost, because a thing cannot be eternity at all except by its immunity from loss. And for the same reason it is incapable of change: since it is eternity, there is no way at all it can be changed.

Here the question will come up: how were good creatures made out of Matter, when they were formed without any change at all? How does the seed of what is good — very good — occur in what is evil, and very evil? Surely a good tree does not produce bad fruit, since there is no God who is not good; nor does a bad tree yield good fruit, since there is no Matter except what is very evil. [u]

Or if we were to grant him that there is some germ of good in it, then it no longer has one uniform nature running through it — a nature evil all the way through — but instead of that we now meet a double nature, partly good and partly evil. And again the question will come up whether, in a subject that is good and evil at once, there could possibly be found a harmony between light and darkness, between sweet and bitter. So again, if qualities so utterly different as good and evil have been able to run together and have given Matter a double nature that bears both kinds of fruit, then good things themselves will no longer be credited to God, just as evil things are not laid at his door; both qualities will belong to Matter, since they are derived from Matter’s own property. At that rate we shall owe God neither thanks for good things nor blame for evil ones, since he has produced no work that is his own by nature. And out of that will come the clear proof that he has been Matter’s servant.

Now it may also be argued that although Matter afforded him the opportunity, it was still his own will that led him to the creation of good creatures, as having detected what was good in Matter — and even this is a discreditable supposition. But at any rate, when he produces evil things as well out of the same Matter, he is Matter’s servant, since obviously it is not of his own accord that he produces these too: he has nothing else he can do than to make his creation out of a bad stock — unwillingly, no doubt, since he is good; and under necessity, too, since he is unwilling; and as an act of service, because it is under necessity. [w]

Which, then, is the worthier thing to think: that he created evil things under necessity, or of his own accord? Because it was indeed under necessity that he created them, if out of Matter; of his own accord, if out of nothing. You are laboring in vain, then, when you try to avoid making God the author of evil things; because, since he made everything out of Matter, they will have to be ascribed to him who made them, simply because he made them. Plainly the point of the question where he made everything from comes to the same thing as the question whether he made everything out of nothing; and where he made it from does not matter, so long as he made it from that source which brought him the most glory. Now more glory came to him from a creation of his own will than from one of necessity — that is, from a creation out of nothing rather than out of Matter. It is worthier to believe that God is free, even as the author of evil things, than that he is a slave. Power, whatever kind of power it is, suits him better than weakness.

And if we grant even this, that Matter had nothing good in it, but that the Lord produced whatever good he did produce by his own power, then other questions will arise with equal reason. First, since there was no good at all in Matter, it is clear that good was not made out of Matter, on the express ground that Matter did not possess it. Next, if good was not made out of Matter, then it must have been made out of God; and if not out of God, then it must have been made out of nothing. For that is the alternative, on Hermogenes’ own arrangement.