The Flesh Marcion Denied

There are people so anxious to shake the belief in the resurrection — a belief long settled before these modern Sadducees of ours ever appeared — that they deny the hope of it has anything to do with the flesh at all. They have every reason, then, to harass the flesh of Christ as well with awkward questions, as though it either never existed or was something quite unlike human flesh. They cannot help being nervous. If it is once settled that Christ’s flesh was human, the presumption immediately stands against them: that flesh must certainly rise again, since in Christ it has risen already. So we will have to defend the flesh’s own hopes out of the same armory the other side takes its weapons of destruction from. Let us examine our Lord’s bodily substance; about his spiritual nature there is no dispute. It is his flesh that is in question. Its reality and its kind are the points at issue. Did it ever exist? Where did it come from? What sort was it? If we can settle that, we lay down the law for our own resurrection. [a]

Marcion denied Christ’s birth in order to deny his flesh — or denied his flesh in order to deny his birth. He was afraid, of course, that birth and flesh would bear witness to each other’s reality, since there is no birth without flesh and no flesh without birth. As if, prompted by the license that is at work in every heresy, he could not just as easily have denied the birth while admitting the flesh — as Apelles did, who was first his pupil and then his deserter — or admitted both the flesh and the birth and read them in some other sense, as Valentinus did, who was like Apelles both in following Marcion and in walking out on him.

In any case, the man who could make Christ’s flesh imaginary was just as able to pass off his birth as a phantom, so that the virgin’s conceiving, and her pregnancy, and her giving birth, and then the whole course of her infant’s life as well, would have to be counted as seeming only. The same eyes and the same senses that failed to take in the truth of his flesh would miss the facts of his birth too.

Gabriel announces the birth plainly enough. But what has Marcion to do with the Creator’s angel? The conceiving in the virgin’s womb is set out plainly too. But what business has he with the Creator’s prophet Isaiah? He will not put up with any delay: he brought Christ down from heaven all at once, with no prophecy to announce him. And so he says: [g]

“Away with that everlasting nuisance of a census under Caesar, and the cramped inn, and the filthy swaddling clothes, and the hard manger. That crowd of the heavenly army praising their Lord at night — who cares? Let the shepherds look after their sheep better, and let the wise men spare their legs so long a journey; they can keep their gold. And let Herod mend his manners, so that Jeremiah gets nothing to crow about. Spare the baby his circumcision too, so he is not hurt by it; and do not bring him into the temple, or he will saddle his parents with the price of the offering; and do not hand him to Simeon, or the old man will be made sad at the point of death. And that old woman had better hold her tongue, in case she puts a spell on the child.”

That, I suppose, Marcion, is the style in which you had the nerve to blot out the original records of Christ’s story, so that his flesh might lose the evidence of its reality. But on what grounds? Show me your authority. If you are a prophet, foretell us something. If you are an apostle, preach your message in public. If you are a follower of the apostles, think with the apostles. If you are only an ordinary Christian, believe what has been handed down to us. And if you are none of these — then, and I have every reason to say it, die.

For in fact you are dead already, since you are not a Christian: you do not believe the thing that makes a man a Christian by being believed. Worse, you are the more dead the more you are not a Christian, having fallen away after being one, by cutting out what you once believed — as you admit yourself in a letter of yours, and as your followers do not deny and our people can prove. So, by cutting out what you once believed, you finished the cut by believing it no longer. But your having stopped believing has not made the cutting right and proper. On the contrary: the cut itself proves that what you believed before you made it was something else. And what you believed to be something else had been handed down exactly as you believed it. Now what had been handed down was true, since it was passed on by the men whose business it was to pass it on. So in cutting out what had been handed down, you cut out what was true. You had no authority for it.

We have already used these standing objections against every heresy, and at greater length, in another book. After that large treatment there is no need to go over them again here, where the question is simply this: what made you decide that Christ was not born?

Since you thought the decision lay with your own free choice, you must have supposed that being born was either impossible for God or beneath him. But with God nothing is impossible except what he does not will. So let us ask whether he willed to be born — for if he willed it he could do it, and he was born. I will put the argument very briefly. If God had willed not to be born, whatever his reason, he would not have presented himself in the likeness of a man. For who, seeing a man, would deny that the man had been born? What God willed not to be, he would certainly not have willed to seem. When a thing is distasteful, the very idea of it is thrown out as well, since it makes no difference whether a thing exists or not, if, while it does not exist, it is still taken to exist. It matters enormously that nothing false be pinned on what does not really exist at all. [n]

But, you say, it was enough for him to know himself what he was. If people supposed he had been born because they saw him as a man, that was their business. Yet how much more dignity and consistency there would have been in his carrying the human part if he really had been born. For if he was not born, he could not take that part on without damaging the very self-knowledge you appeal to — you, who credit him with the confidence to keep up, unborn, the character of one who had been born, and to keep it up against what he knew himself to be.

Tell me: why was it so important that Christ, knowing perfectly well what he really was, should exhibit himself as what he was not? You cannot say you were afraid that if he had been born and truly clothed himself with man’s nature he would have stopped being God, losing what he was while becoming what he was not. God is in no danger of losing his own state and condition.

But, you say, I deny that God was really changed into a man in such a way as to be born and given a body of flesh, and my ground is this: a being without end must also be incapable of change, since being changed into something else puts an end to the former state. Change, therefore, is not possible for a being who cannot come to an end. No doubt things that are subject to change are governed by that law: they have no permanence in the state that is being changed in them, and for want of permanence they come to an end, losing in the change what they previously were. But nothing is on a level with God. His nature stands apart from the condition of everything else. So if the things that differ from God, and from which God differs, lose the existence they had while they are being changed, where will the difference of the divine being from all other things lie, except in his having the opposite capacity to theirs — that is, that God can be changed into any condition at all and still continue just as he is? Otherwise he would be on a level with the things that lose their former existence when they change; and he is certainly not their equal in anything else, any more than he is in the way their changes turn out.

You have read, and believed, that the Creator’s angels were changed into human shape and carried about a body so genuine that Abraham washed their feet, and Lot was rescued out of the hands of the men of Sodom by theirs; and that an angel wrestled with a man so hard, and so bodily, that the man wanted to be let go, he was held so tight. So angels, who are less than God, have been allowed to be changed into human bodily form and still remain angels — and will you strip God, who is greater than they are, of that power, as though Christ could not go on being God after really taking up the nature of a man? Or were those angels phantoms of flesh? You will not have the courage to say it. For if you hold that the Creator’s angels are in the same case as Christ, then Christ belongs to the same God the angels do, since they are like him in their condition.

If you had not deliberately thrown out some of the Scriptures that stand against your opinion, and corrupted others, you would have been refuted in this by the Gospel of John, where it says that the Spirit came down in the body of a dove and settled on the Lord. In that condition the Spirit was as truly a dove as he was also a spirit, and he did not destroy his own proper substance by taking up a substance that was not his. But you ask what became of the dove’s body once the Spirit had gone back to heaven, and the same about the angels. They withdrew the same way they had appeared. If you had seen how they were produced out of nothing, you would know how they went back into nothing too. The first step was out of sight; so was the last. All the same, there was solidity in their bodily substance, whatever the power was that made the body visible. What is written cannot but have happened.

Since, then, you do not reject his taking a body as impossible, or as risky to God’s character, all that is left for you is to throw it out and condemn it as unworthy of him. Come on, then: start with the birth itself. Make your speech against the uncleanness of the generative elements inside the womb, the filthy curdling of fluid and blood, the flesh that grows for nine months out of that very mud. Describe the womb swelling day after day, heavy, troublesome, restless even in sleep, veering between what it cannot stand and what it craves. Rail at the shame of a woman in labor too — which ought rather to be honored for the danger she is in, or held sacred out of respect for nature. [r]

No doubt the baby horrifies you as well, poured out into life with all the mess that comes with it from the womb; and no doubt you loathe it even after it is washed, when it is done up in swaddling clothes, shaped by rub after rub of oil, laughed over by a nurse’s coaxing. This is the reverence owed to nature, Marcion, and you spit on it — and yet, how were you born yourself? You detest a human being at his birth; so how do you go about loving anybody? You certainly had no love for yourself when you walked out of the church and the faith of Christ. But never mind, if you are on bad terms with yourself, or even if you were born in some way other people are not.

Christ, at any rate, loved that man: the man clotted together in his mother’s womb among all its uncleannesses, the man brought out into life from that womb, the man brought up among a nurse’s foolish noises. For his sake Christ came down, for his sake he preached, for his sake “he humbled himself, even to death — the death of the cross.” Of course he loved the being he bought back at such a price. If Christ is the Creator’s Son, he was right to love what was his own; if he comes from some other god, his love went too far, since he bought back a being that belonged to someone else. So then: loving man, he loved his birth as well, and his flesh as well. Nothing can be loved apart from the thing by which whatever exists has its existence. Either take away birth, and then show us your man; or take away flesh, and then produce for us the being God has bought back — since these are the very things that make up the man God has bought back.

And do you mean to turn them into a reason for blushing, for the very creature he has bought back? To condemn them, too, as unworthy of the one who certainly would not have bought them back if he had not loved them? Our birth he remakes from death by a second birth from heaven. Our flesh he repairs from every disease that troubles it: leprous, he cleans the stain off it; blind, he lights it up again; paralyzed, he puts the strength back into it; held by demons, he drives them out of it; dead, he brings it back to life. And after that are we to blush to own it?

Suppose, to be sure, he had chosen to be born of a mere animal, and preached the kingdom of heaven wearing the body of a beast, wild or tame. Your censure would have met him at once with the objection: “This is a disgrace for God. This is unworthy of the Son of God. This is simply foolish.” For no other reason than that one judges so. Of course it is foolish — if we are going to judge God by our own way of thinking.

But look hard at this passage, Marcion, if you have not erased it: “God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.” Now what are those foolish things? Turning people to the worship of the true God? Giving up error? The whole training in righteousness, chastity, mercy, patience and innocence? Those things are certainly not foolish. Ask again, then, what he was speaking of; and when you think you have found out what they are, will you find anything as foolish as believing in a God who has been born — born of a virgin, and in flesh, and who wallowed in all those humiliations of nature I have just listed? Someone may say: “These are not the foolish things; the things God chose to confound the wisdom of the world must be something else.” And yet, by the world’s own wisdom, it is easier to believe that Jupiter turned into a bull or a swan — if we listen to Marcion — than that Christ really became a man.