A Flower from the Hedgerow

But suppose we were willing to grant that he exists. We would still be bound to argue that he exists without a cause. Anyone who has nothing to show for himself would be without a cause, since the proof is the whole cause of there being someone for the proof to belong to. And to the degree that nothing ought to be without a cause — that is, without a proof, because a thing without a cause might as well not exist, since it lacks the very proof that is a thing’s cause — to that same degree I will more properly believe that God does not exist than that he exists without a cause. For he is without a cause who has no cause, and he has none because he has no proof. And God ought not to be without a cause, that is, without a proof. So every time I show that he exists without a cause, then even while allowing that he exists I am in fact settling that he does not; because if he had existed, he could not have existed altogether without a cause. [a]

The same holds for faith itself. I say that this god is trying to get faith out of a man without cause — out of a man who is otherwise used to believing in God from the idea he forms of him through the evidence of his works. Without cause, I repeat, because he has provided no proof of the kind by which people came to know God in the first place. Most people do believe in God, but they do not believe straight off by unaided reason, without some token of divinity in works worthy of God. And so, on this very ground of idleness and lack of works, Marcion’s god stands guilty of both impudence and malice. Impudence, in reaching for a belief that is not owed him and for which he has laid no foundation. Malice, in bringing many people under the charge of unbelief by giving them nothing to build their faith on.

While we are throwing out of the rank of God a god who has no evidence to show for himself as proper and as worthy of God as the Creator’s, Marcion’s utterly shameless followers turn on the Creator’s works with high-handed insolence to tear them down. Oh, certainly, they say: “The world is a grand piece of work — worthy of a god.” Then the Creator is no god at all? “By all means he is a god.” Then the world is not unworthy of God, since God has made nothing unworthy of himself — even though he made the world for man and not for himself, and even though every work is less than the one who made it. And in any case, if it is unworthy of God to have been the author of a creation such as ours, how much more unworthy of him to have created absolutely nothing at all! Not even some production which, unworthy as it might be, would at least have raised the hope of a better attempt. [e]

Now a word about the supposed unworthiness of this world’s fabric — a thing the Greeks themselves gave a name that means ornament and grace, not squalor. Those very professional wise men, whose cleverness is where every heresy gets its spirit, called these unworthy elements divine: Thales said it of water, Heraclitus of fire, Anaximenes of air, Anaximander of all the heavenly bodies, Strato of the sky and the earth, Zeno of air and ether, and Plato of the stars, which he calls a fiery kind of gods. As for the world itself, when they weighed its size, its strength, its power, its dignity and its splendor — and the abundance too, and the regularity and law of those separate elements that go to produce, feed, ripen and reproduce everything — most of the philosophers shrank from giving the world a beginning and an end, for fear that its component substances, great as they undoubtedly are, might stop being counted as divine. And those very elements are objects of worship among the Persian magi, the Egyptian hierophants, and the naked sages of India.

Even the superstition of the crowd, which the common idolatry feeds, does the same. Ashamed of the names and the tales of the long-dead men its idols carry, it falls back on explaining them as natural objects, and so cloaks its own disgrace very cleverly: Jupiter is reduced to a hot substance and Juno to an airy one, going by the plain sense of the Greek names; Vesta in the same way to fire, the Muses to waters, and the Great Mother to the earth — mown of its crops, ploughed up by strong arms, washed with water. So too with Osiris: buried, looked for to come back to life, and then recovered with joy, he is an emblem of the regularity with which the fruits of the ground return, the elements revive, and the year comes round. And the lions of Mithras are the philosophers’ sacred emblems of parched and scorched nature.

It is enough for me that the natural elements, the first in place and rank, were more readily taken for divine than for unworthy of God. But I will come down to humbler things. One little flower from a hedge — I do not even say from a meadow; one small shell out of any sea at all — I do not say out of the Red Sea; one stray wing of a moorhen — I say nothing of the peacock: these, I suppose, will prove to you what a shoddy workman the Creator was.

And when you are making merry over those smaller animals, which their glorious Maker deliberately stocked with a wealth of instinct and resource — teaching us by that very thing that greatness proves itself in what is lowly, just as, in the apostle’s words, there is power even in weakness — then copy them, if you can: the bee’s cells, the ant’s hills, the spider’s webs, the silkworm’s threads. And put up with them too, if you know how — those creatures that infest your bed and your house, the blister-beetle’s poisonous discharge, the fly’s prickle, the gnat’s sheathed sting. What will you make of the larger animals, when the small ones already touch you with such pleasure or such pain that even in their case you cannot despise their Creator? [k]

Last of all, take a walk around yourself. Look a human being over, inside and out. Even this handiwork of our God will please you, seeing that your own lord, that better god, fell so much in love with it that for your sake he took the trouble to come down from the third heaven into these poverty-stricken elements, and for the same reason let himself be crucified in this shabby little room of the Creator’s. Indeed, to this day he has not turned up his nose at the water the Creator made, which he uses to wash his people; nor at the oil he anoints them with; nor at that mixture of honey and milk with which he feeds them like infants; nor at the bread by which he presents his own body. In his very rites, then, he has to have the Creator’s “beggarly elements.”

You, though, are a student who outranks his teacher and a slave who outranks his master. Your discernment reaches higher than his; you destroy what he requires. I would like to test whether you are at least honest about it, and have no appetite for the things you destroy. You are the sky’s enemy, and yet you are glad to let its freshness into your house. You run down the earth — the womb your own flesh came from — as though it were your sworn enemy, and yet you draw all its richness out of it for your food. The sea you condemn as well, and you never stop using what it produces, which you count the holier diet. Offer you a rose, and you will not despise its Maker. Hypocrite: however much abstinence you practice to show yourself a Marcionite, that is, a man who disowns his own Maker — for if the world really displeased you, that abstinence ought to have been carried through as a martyrdom — you will still have to keep company with the Creator’s material world, into whatever element you are finally dissolved. What a hard, stubborn thing this is! You slander the very things you live in and die in.

After all this — or before it, if you like — you have said that your god has a creation of his own, his own world, his own sky. We shall look into that third heaven when we come to your own apostle. Meanwhile, whatever this created substance is, it ought at least to have made its appearance in company with its own god. So how does it happen that the lord has been revealed since the twelfth year of Tiberius Caesar, while no creation of his at all has been discovered down to the fifteenth year of the emperor Severus? Being finer than the Creator’s trifling works, surely it should have stopped hiding once its lord and maker was no longer in hiding. So I ask: if it could not show itself in this world, how did its lord appear in this world? If this world received its lord, why could it not receive his created substance — unless perhaps the creation was greater than its lord? [q]

But now a question about place comes up, and it concerns both the world above and the god of it. Look: if Marcion’s god has his own world beneath him and above the Creator, then he has certainly fixed it in a position, in a space that lay empty between his own feet and the Creator’s head. So this god took up space himself and made his world take up space; and that space will be greater than the god and the world together, since in no case is what contains not greater than what is contained. And indeed we had better see to it that no odd patches are left vacant here and there, into which some third god might squeeze himself with a world of his own.

Now start reckoning up your gods. Space will count as a god — not only because it is greater than God, but because it is unbegotten and unmade, and therefore eternal, and God’s equal, since God has always been in it. Then, since this god too fashioned a world out of some underlying material which is unbegotten and unmade and as old as God himself — exactly what Marcion holds about the Creator — you raise matter as well to the rank of that space which has now enclosed two gods, God and matter. For by the rule of what makes a god, matter is a god too: unbegotten, of course, and unmade, and eternal. But if it was out of nothing that he made his world, our heretic will have to say the same about the Creator, under whom he puts matter as the substance of the world. Still, it is only right that Marcion’s god made his world out of matter too, since as God he had the same process open to him that lay before the Creator, who is equally God. So you may reckon up three gods on Marcion’s side, at least so far: the maker, space, and matter.

Then in the same way he makes the Creator a god in a space of his own, which has to be rated on exactly the same scale of rank; and under the Creator as its lord he puts matter, which is nevertheless unbegotten and unmade and, for that reason, eternal. And with this matter he pairs evil — an unbegotten principle with an unbegotten object, an unmade with an unmade, an eternal with an eternal. So here he makes a fourth god. That gives you three divine substances in the higher instances and four in the lower. Add their two Christs to these — the one that appeared in the time of Tiberius, and the one the Creator has promised — and Marcion is plainly wronged by anyone who assumes he holds two gods. What he implies, without knowing it, is no fewer than nine.

Since, then, that other world never appears, and neither does its god, the only resource left them is to divide things into two classes, visible and invisible, with a separate god as author of each, and so to claim the invisible for their own supreme God. But who, apart from a heretical spirit, could ever bring his mind to believe that the invisible part of creation belongs to the one who has so far displayed nothing visible, rather than to the God who, by his work on the visible world, produced belief in the invisible as well? It is far more reasonable to give your assent after seeing some samples of a work than after seeing none. We shall see which author even your favorite apostle assigns the invisible creation to, when we come to examine him. For the present I hold his evidence back, since I am mostly engaged in preparing the way, by common sense and fair arguments, for belief in the support of the Scriptures when it comes. [t]

I say, then, that this difference between things visible and invisible must on this very ground be credited to the Creator, because his whole work consists of differences: bodily and bodiless, alive and lifeless, voiced and mute, moving and fixed, fertile and barren, dry and wet, hot and cold. A human being too is blended out of differences in the same way, in his body and in his feeling. Some of his parts are strong, others weak; some handsome, others not; some doubled, others single; some alike, others unlike. His feeling is varied in the same way: now joy, then anxiety; now love, then hatred; now anger, then calm.

That being so — since the whole of this creation of ours has been composed with its several parts set in rivalry against each other — the invisible things go with the visible, and are not to be assigned to any author but the one their counterparts are charged to; for they mark out a diversity in the Creator himself, who orders what he had forbidden and forbids what he had ordered, and who both strikes and heals. Why do they take him to be uniform in one class of things alone, the maker of visible things and only those, when he ought to be believed to have created the invisible as well as the visible, in exactly the way he makes life and death, or evil and peace? And truly, if invisible creatures are greater than visible ones, which are great enough in their own order, then it is fitting that the greater should belong to the one who owns the great; for neither the great nor the greater can be suitable property for someone who seems to own not even the smallest things.

Pressed by these arguments, they cry out: “One work is enough for our god. He has delivered man by his supreme and most excellent goodness, and that is worth more than all the locusts.” What sort of superior god is this, when no work of his can be found as great as the lesser god’s man! Beyond question the first thing you have to do is prove that he exists, in the way the existence of a god ordinarily has to be proved — by his works; and only after that by his good deeds. For the first question is whether he exists, and then what his character is. The first is tested by his works, the second by how good those works are. It does not simply follow that he exists because he is said to have worked a deliverance for man; only once it has been settled that he exists will there be room to say that he brought this liberation about. And even that point must have evidence of its own, since it is perfectly possible both that he exists and that he has not worked the deliverance you allege. [v]

Now in the section of this work that dealt with the question of the unknown god, two things were made clear enough: that he had created nothing, and that he ought to have been a creator in order to be known by his works. If he had existed, he ought to have been known, and known from the beginning of things; it was not fitting that God should lie hidden. I shall have to go back to the very trunk of that question of the unknown god, so that I can strike off along some of its other branches too. The first thing to ask is why the one who eventually brought himself to notice did it so late, and not at the very start. He ought never to have been hidden from creatures with whom, as God, he was so closely bound up — and the more necessary that bond, the greater his goodness. For no one can pretend that there was no way of coming to the knowledge of God, or no good reason for it, when man was in the world from the beginning, the man for whom the deliverance has now come; and so was that malevolence of the Creator’s, against which the good God has worked the deliverance. So he either did not know the reason and the means for the showing of himself that was needed, or he doubted them; or else he was unable or unwilling to face them. Every one of these alternatives is unworthy of God, and above all of the supreme and best God. This subject I shall take up more fully later on, along with a condemnation of the lateness of the manifestation; for now I only point it out.