Never New, Never Unknown

But you will try to shake this argument with an objection drawn from the name of God. The name, you say, is a loose one, applied to other beings as well. So it is written: “God stands in the assembly of the gods; he judges among the gods.” And again: “I have said, You are gods.” If supremacy would be out of place in these, though they are called gods, then it is out of place in the Creator too. The objection is a silly one, and my answer is that whoever makes it has not noticed how well it would work against Marcion’s own god. He too is called god, and that does not prove him divine — any more than it proves it of angels or of men, who are the Creator’s handiwork. [a]

If a shared name gave any presumption of a shared condition, think how often worthless slaves swagger about under the names of kings — your Alexanders, your Dariuses, your Holoferneses. It takes nothing away from what the real kings are. More than that: the very idols of the nations are called gods, and not one of them is divine for being called one. So it is not for the name of god, for its sound or the way it is written, that I claim supremacy for the Creator, but for the substance the name belongs to. And when I find that this substance alone is unbegotten and unmade, alone eternal, and the maker of all things, then it is not to its name that I assign supremacy but to its state, not to what it is called but to what it is.

And because the substance I assign it to has come to be called god, you suppose I am assigning it to the name — since I have to use a name to say what the substance is. That is the substance the Being consists of who is called God, and who is reckoned the supreme Great because of his substance and not because of his name. Marcion himself, after all, when he claims that rank for his god, claims it for the nature and not for the word.

So the supremacy we ascribe to God on account of his substance, and not because of his name, ought — this is our position — to belong on equal terms to both beings who consist of the substance for which the name of God is given. In so far as they are called gods (that is, supreme beings, on the strength of a substance unbegotten and eternal, and therefore great and supreme), in so far the standing of the supreme Great cannot be smaller or worse in one supreme Great than in another. If the blessedness and the loftiness and the completeness of a supreme being hold good of Marcion’s god, they will hold equally of ours; and if they do not hold of ours, they equally do not hold of Marcion’s.

Two supreme beings, then, will be neither equal nor unequal. Not equal, because the principle just set out forbids it: the supreme Great admits of no comparison with itself. Not unequal, because another principle about the supreme Great meets us: it admits of no diminishing. So, Marcion, you are aground in the middle of your own Pontic tide. The waves of truth come over you from every side. You can set up neither equal gods nor unequal ones. There are not two — not so far as the question of number properly goes. The whole matter of the two gods is what is at issue, but we have kept the argument so far inside certain bounds; inside them we now have to fight it out point by point.

In the first place, look at the arrogance with which the Marcionites build up their stupidity. They bring forward a new god, as though we were ashamed of the old one. Schoolboys are proud of new shoes in just that way, until the old master beats the strut out of them. [f]

Now I hear of a new god — one unknown and unheard of in the old world, in the old age, under the old god; one who counted for nobody through all those centuries back and was ancient only in men’s ignorance of him; one whom a certain “Jesus Christ” revealed, and nobody before him, this Christ himself being new on their showing, even under ancient names. For that boast of theirs I am grateful. It is the very thing that lets me prove their new deity a heresy straight away.

It will turn out to be the same sort of novelty that has made gods for the nations too, with a new and always newer title for each fresh deification. What new god is there that is not a false one? Not even Saturn will be proved a god by all his ancient fame, since it was a novel pretense that at some point produced even him, when it first made him a god.

Living and true deity, on the contrary, is reckoned neither by newness nor by age, but by what it is in itself. Eternity has no time; it is itself all time. It acts, and so it cannot be acted upon. It cannot be born, and so it has no age. A God who is old forfeits the eternity that is to come; a God who is new forfeits the eternity that is past. Newness bears witness to a beginning; age threatens an end. And God stands as clear of a beginning and an end as he does of time, which is nothing but the judge and the measurer of a beginning and an end.

I know perfectly well what faculty it is they boast of their new god by: their knowledge. But it is exactly this that I wanted to refute — the discovery of something novel, so striking to ordinary minds, and the natural pleasure that comes with novelty — and from there to demand a proof of this unknown god. The one their knowledge presents to us as new, they thereby prove to have been unknown before that knowledge came. [i]

Let us keep to the strict limits and measure of the argument. Convince me that there could have been an unknown god. I do find, certainly, that altars have been lavished on unknown gods — but that is the idolatry of Athens. And on uncertain gods — but that is only Roman superstition. And uncertain gods are not well known, since no certainty about them exists; and because of that uncertainty they are unknown as well. Which of the two titles shall we carve for Marcion’s god? Both, I suppose: a being still uncertain, and formerly unknown. For just as the Creator, being a known God, made him unknown, so, being a certain God, he made him uncertain.

But I will not wander so far off my road as to say this: if God was unknown and hidden, he was overshadowed in some region of darkness which must itself have been new and unknown, and must be uncertain even now — some immense region, and undoubtedly greater than the God it was hiding. I will state my case briefly instead and pursue it fully afterwards, and my undertaking is this: that God neither could have been unknown nor ought to have been. Could not have been, because of his greatness; ought not to have been, because of his goodness — all the more so since Marcion supposes him better than our Creator in both.

Since, however, I notice that on some points the proof of any new and hitherto unknown god has to be called out and measured against the standard of the Creator, my first duty is to show that I take this course on a settled principle, one I can use in support of my argument with all the more confidence. Before anything else, then: how is it that you, who acknowledge the Creator to be God and by your own knowledge confess that he existed first, do not see that the other god should be examined by exactly the procedure that taught you how to find a god in the first place? Whatever comes first supplies the rule for what comes after.

Two gods are put before us, the unknown and the known. About the known there is no question. He plainly exists, or he would not be known. The dispute is about the unknown one. Possibly he does not exist at all — because if he did, he would have been known. And a thing which is open to question so long as it is unknown is uncertain so long as it stays open to question; and all the while it is uncertain, it possibly does not exist at all. You have a god who is certain in so far as he is known, and uncertain in so far as he is unknown.

That being so, does it look to you like a fair position that uncertainties should be submitted for proof to the rule and the form and the standard of certainties? For if arguments drawn from uncertainties are brought to a subject which is itself full of uncertainty thus far, we shall be tangled in a whole train of questions rising out of those same uncertain arguments — questions which, just because they are uncertain, are dangerous to faith; and we shall drift into the insoluble sort of question the apostle has no love for.

If, on the other hand, they take things whose condition differs and prejudge the uncertain, the doubtful and the intricate by the certain, undoubted and clear parts of their rule, then what will probably happen is that those points will not be submitted to the standard of certainties for decision at all — the difference in their basic condition frees them from having such a standard applied to them in every other respect.

But since it is two gods that our proposition is about, their basic condition must be the same in both. As far as their divinity goes, both are unbegotten, unmade, eternal. That is their basic condition. Everything else Marcion himself seems to have waved aside, since he has put it in another category. Those points come later in the order of treatment; indeed they will not have to be brought into the discussion at all, since about the basic condition there is no dispute. And there is no dispute about it because they are both of them gods.

So things whose common condition is evident will, when they are tested on the ground of that common condition, have to be submitted — uncertain though they are — to the standard of the certainties they are classed with in that common condition, and so will share their manner of proof as well. I shall therefore press this with all confidence: he is not God who is uncertain today because he has been unknown until today. For of whoever it is evident that he is God, from that very fact it is equally evident that he has never been unknown, and therefore never uncertain.

For indeed, being the Creator of all things, he was discovered from the beginning along with them; they were brought into view precisely so that he might become known as God. Moses, a long while afterwards, may seem to have been the first to dedicate the knowledge of the God of the universe in the temple of his writings — but the birthday of that knowledge is not to be dated from the Pentateuch for all that. The book of Moses does not set up the knowledge of the Creator; from its opening it declares that the knowledge is to be traced from Paradise and Adam, not from Egypt and Moses. [m]

Most of the human race, then, though they did not so much as know the name of Moses, let alone his writings, still knew the God of Moses. Even when idolatry lay over the world at its thickest, men still spoke of him separately, by his own name, as God, and as the God of gods, and said, “If God grants it,” and “As God pleases,” and “I commend you to God.” Think whether they knew him, when they testify that he can do all things. They owe none of that to the writings of Moses. The soul came before Scripture.

From the beginning the knowledge of God is the soul’s dowry, one and the same among the Egyptians and the Syrians and the tribes of Pontus; for their souls call the God of the Jews their God. Do not put Abraham in front of the world, you barbarian heretic. Even if the Creator had been the God of one family only, he was still not later than your god: even in Pontus he was known before him.

Take your standard, then, from the one who came first. The uncertain is to be judged from the Certain, the unknown from the Known. God will never be hidden; God will never be missing. He will always be understood, always heard, and even seen, in whatever way he chooses. God has for his witnesses this whole being of ours and this universe we live in. That is how he is proved — because he is not unknown — to be God, and the only one, though another still works hard to make good his claim.

“And rightly so. For who is less well known from what is his own than from what is foreign to him? Nobody.” That is what they say, and I hold them to it. How could anything be foreign to God — to whom, if he really existed, nothing would be foreign? This is exactly what belongs to God: that all things are his, and all things belong to him. Otherwise you would not so readily hear this question from us: what has he to do with things that are not his? — a point that will be taken up more fully in its own place. For the moment it is enough to note that nobody is proved to exist to whom nothing is proved to belong. The Creator is shown to be God, and beyond any doubt God, by the fact that all things are his and nothing is foreign to him; and the rival god is seen to be no god at all by the fact that nothing is his, and everything is therefore foreign to him. [q]

Since the universe belongs to the Creator, I see no room left for any other god. All things are full of their Author and occupied by him. If among created things there were some patch of space anywhere with no deity in it, then plainly the empty place would belong to a false deity. Falsehood is how truth is made clear. Why can the vast crowd of false gods not find room somewhere for Marcion’s god?

So this is what I insist on, taking my measure from the character of the Creator: God must have been known from the works of a world of his own — his own world, his own man, his own age. Even the world’s error has gone so far as to call certain men gods when it recognizes them, on the ground that in every such case something is seen which provides for the uses and conveniences of life. That too, then, was believed to be a divine function, on the pattern of what God is: to teach or point out what is useful and needed in human affairs. The authority that has given a false divinity its standing was borrowed entirely from the source it had flowed out from to the true one first.

Marcion’s god ought to have produced at least one stray chickpea of his own; then he might be advertised as a new Triptolemus. Or else let them give some reason worthy of a God why he created nothing. On the assumption that he exists at all, he must have been a creator, on the very principle by which it is clear to us that our God exists in no other way than as having been the Creator of this universe of ours.

For the rule holds good once and for all: they cannot both acknowledge the Creator to be God and also prove divine the one they want believed in as God on the same terms, unless they fit him to the standard of the God whom they and everyone else hold to be God. And that standard is this: since nobody doubts that the Creator is God on the express ground that he made the universe, then on that same ground nobody ought to believe that a being who has made nothing is also God — unless, of course, some good reason is produced. And the reason has to be one of two: either he was unwilling to create, or he was unable. There is no third.

That he was unable is a reason unworthy of a God. Whether being unwilling is a worthy one, I want to look into. Tell me, Marcion: did your god want to be recognized at some point, or not? What else did he come down from heaven for, and preach, and suffer, and rise again from the dead, if not to be acknowledged? And since he was acknowledged, plainly he willed it — for nothing could have happened to him against his will.

And what did so much toward making him known as his appearing in the humiliation of the flesh — a humiliation lower still if the flesh was only a pretense? It was all the more shameful if the one who brought the Creator’s curse on himself by hanging on a tree was only pretending to have taken a body at all.

He might have laid a far nobler foundation for the knowledge of himself in some evidence of a creation of his own — all the more so when he had to become known in opposition to the God in whose territory he had gone unknown from the beginning, with no works to show. For how does it come about that the Creator, who according to the Marcionites had no idea any god existed above him, and who used to declare on oath that he was alone, should have guarded the knowledge of himself with such mighty works — a knowledge about which, if he really was alone and without a rival, he might have spared himself all care; while the Superior God, who knew all along how well equipped with power his inferior rival was, made no provision whatever toward getting himself acknowledged? He ought to have produced works more splendid and more exalted still, so that by the Creator’s own standard he might both be acknowledged as God from his works, and, by nobler deeds, show himself more powerful and more generous than the Creator.