Late to the Rescue

Very well, then: he has now come into notice — just when he pleased, when he was able, when the appointed hour arrived. Perhaps until now he was held back by his ascending star, or by some malignant influence, or by Saturn in quadrature, or Mars at the trine. The Marcionites are heavily given to astrology, and they are not ashamed to make their living out of the very stars the Creator made — the Creator they run down. [a]

Here too we have to deal with the character of this new revelation: whether Marcion’s supreme god has been made known in a way worthy of himself, so that his existence is proved; and made known truthfully, so that he may be believed to be the very one who was already shown to have been revealed in a manner worthy of his character. For what is worthy of God is what proves that God exists. Our position is this. God has to be known first from nature, and afterward known again from teaching: from nature by his works, from teaching by his proclamations. Now where nature has been ruled out, no natural means of knowing is supplied. So this god ought to have taken all the more trouble to work up a revelation of himself by proclamation at least — especially since he had to be revealed against One who, after works so many and so great, in creation and in proclamation alike, had only with difficulty succeeded in satisfying men’s belief.

In what way, then, has the revelation been made? If by human guesswork, then say rather that God cannot possibly become known in any way but by himself; and appeal not only to the Creator’s precedent but to the terms of God’s greatness and man’s smallness — so that it can never turn out that man is greater than God, by having somehow dragged him out into public notice when God himself was unwilling to be known by his own working. And this, when man’s smallness has been able, by experiments the world over, to manufacture gods for itself more easily than to follow the true God, whom people already understand from nature.

Besides: if a man is going to be able to devise a god this way — as Romulus devised Consus, and Tatius Cloacina, and Hostilius Fear, and Metellus Alburnus, and a certain person not long ago Antinous — then the same feat may be allowed to anyone else. For our part, we have got our shipmaster in Marcion, though he is neither a king nor an emperor.

Yes, but our god, say the Marcionites — “though he did not show himself from the beginning and by means of the creation, he has nevertheless revealed himself in Christ Jesus.” A whole book will be given to Christ and to the entire question of his condition; these subjects are better kept apart, so that each may get fuller and more orderly treatment. For the moment it will be enough, at this stage of the question, if I show — and briefly — that Christ Jesus carries about and displays no god but the Creator. [g]

In the fifteenth year of Tiberius, Christ Jesus condescended to come down from heaven as the spirit of saving health. In which particular year of the elder Antoninus, I have not troubled to inquire. The one whose purpose was so full of grace breathed out this health of his — the salvation Marcion teaches — from his own Pontus, and breathed it like the sickly wind of the dog days. About this teacher there is no doubt: he is a heretic of the Antonine age, an impious man under Pius. Now from Tiberius to Antoninus Pius is about a hundred and fifteen years and six and a half months. That is exactly the interval they themselves put between Christ and Marcion.

So then: since Marcion, as we have shown, first brought this god to notice in the time of Antoninus, the matter becomes clear at once to a sharp observer. The dates already decide the case. The one who came to light for the first time under Antoninus did not appear under Tiberius. In other words, the god of the Antonine age was not the god of the Tiberian; and so the god Marcion plainly preached for the first time was not revealed by Christ, who announced his revelation as far back as the reign of Tiberius.

Now, to make the rest of the argument clear, I shall draw my materials from my opponents themselves. Marcion’s own special and principal work is the separation of the law from the gospel, and his disciples will not deny that here they have their very best pretext for taking up his heresy and settling themselves in it. These are Marcion’s Antitheses — his contradictory propositions — which set out to commit the gospel to a quarrel with the law, so that from the difference between the two documents that contain them they may argue for a difference of gods as well.

Since, then, it is this very opposition between law and gospel that has suggested a God of the gospel different from the God of the law, it is clear that before that separation was made, the god who became known out of the argument for the separation itself could not have been known at all. He therefore cannot have been revealed by Christ, who came before the separation; he must have been devised by Marcion, the author of the breach of peace between the gospel and the law. And that peace, which stood unhurt and unshaken from Christ’s appearing down to Marcion’s presumption, was plainly kept by one way of thinking: that the God of the law and the God of the gospel were none other than the Creator — against whom, after so long a time, a separation has now been introduced by the heretic of Pontus.

This conclusion is as plain as anything can be, and we have to defend it against the shouting on the other side. For they allege that Marcion did not so much innovate on the rule of faith by separating law from gospel as restore it, after it had already been adulterated. O most patient Lord Christ, who put up for so many years with this tampering with your own revelation, until Marcion, of course, came to your rescue! [l]

They bring up the case of Peter himself and the others, the pillars of the apostolate, as having been blamed by Paul for not walking straight according to the truth of the gospel — that very Paul, mind you, who was still in the mere rudiments of grace, and trembling, in fact, in case he had run or was still running in vain, and who was then for the first time meeting the men who had been apostles before him. So then: as a new convert, in the eagerness of his zeal against Judaism, he thought there was something to blame in their conduct — namely, that they ate at table with anyone and everyone. But he himself was afterward to become all things to all men in his own practice, in order to gain them all: to the Jews a Jew, and to those under the law as under the law. And you would have his censure — aimed only at conduct that would one day become acceptable even to the man who censured it — suspected of charging them with being false to God in what they preached.

As for what they preached, however, they had, as we have already said, joined hands in perfect concord, and had agreed as well on the division of the work in their partnership in the gospel. And elsewhere he says: “Whether it was I or they, this is how we preach.”

Again, when he mentioned “certain false brothers who had slipped in unnoticed,” men who wanted to shift the Galatians over to another gospel, he himself shows that this adulteration of the gospel was not meant to transfer them to faith in another god and another christ, but rather to keep the teaching of the law going. For he blames them for maintaining circumcision and for observing seasons and days and months and years, according to Jewish ceremonies which they ought to have known were now cancelled — cancelled by the new arrangement the Creator himself had purposed, and had foretold long before through his prophets. So he says by Isaiah: “The old things have passed away. See, I am doing a new thing.” And in another passage: “I will make a new covenant, not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers when I brought them out of the land of Egypt.” And by Jeremiah in the same way: “Make yourselves a new covenant. Circumcise yourselves to the Lord, and take away the foreskins of your heart.”

It is this circumcision, then, and this renewal, that the apostle was pressing when he forbade those ancient ceremonies — the ceremonies whose own founder had announced that they were one day to cease. So by Hosea: “I will also make all her mirth to cease: her feast days, her new moons, her sabbaths, and all her solemn assemblies.” And by Isaiah likewise: “The new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies — I cannot bear them. Your holy days and fasts and feast days my soul hates.”

Now if even the Creator had discarded all these things so long before, and the apostle was now proclaiming them fit to be renounced, then the very agreement of the apostle’s meaning with the Creator’s decrees proves that no other God was preached by the apostle than the one whose purposes he now wanted recognized. And that is exactly why he branded both apostles and brothers as false: because they were pushing the gospel of Christ the Creator back from the new state of things the Creator had foretold into the old one he had thrown away.

Now if his aim in being so eager to abolish the old God’s law was to preach a new god, how is it that he lays down no rule at all about the new god, but only about the old law? What reason can there be, except that faith in the Creator was still to continue, and his law alone was to come to an end? Just as the psalmist had declared: “Let us break their bonds apart and throw their cords away from us. Why did the nations rage, and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth stood up, and the rulers took counsel together against the Lord and against his Anointed.” [r]

And indeed, if another god were being preached by Paul, there could be no question at all about the law, whether it was to be kept or not; it would obviously not belong to the new lord, the law’s rival. The sheer newness and difference of the god would take away not only every question about the old and foreign law but even every mention of it. But the whole question, as it then stood, was this: that although the God of the law was the same God who was preached in Christ, still his law was being partly repealed. So faith in the Creator and in his Christ stood permanent throughout; it was only the way of life and the discipline that wavered. Some disputed about eating meat sacrificed to idols, others about the veiled dress of women, others again about marriage and divorce, and some even about the hope of the resurrection — but about God nobody disputed. If this question too had come into dispute, it would surely be found in the apostle, and found as a great and vital point.

No doubt, after the time of the apostles, the truth about belief in God suffered corruption. But it is equally certain that during the apostles’ lifetime their teaching on this great matter suffered nothing at all. So no other teaching will have the right to be received as apostolic than the one proclaimed today in the churches of apostolic foundation. And you will find no church of apostolic descent that is not Christian in the Creator. But if the churches turn out to have been corrupt from the very beginning, where are the pure ones to be found? Among the Creator’s adversaries? Show us one of your churches, then, tracing its descent from an apostle, and you will have won the case.

Since, then, it is evident on every count that from Christ down to Marcion’s time there was no God in the rule of the sacred truth except the Creator, the proof of our argument is sufficiently established: we have shown that our heretic’s god first became known by his separation of the gospel from the law. Our earlier position is accordingly made good — that no god is to be believed whom any man has devised out of his own head, unless the man happens to be a prophet, in which case his own head is not what is involved. If Marcion can lay claim to that inspired standing, it will have to be shown. There must be no hedging. For this is the wedge of truth that drives out every heresy: Christ is proved to display no God but the Creator.

But how is this Antichrist to be thoroughly overthrown unless we relax our defense of mere prescription and give ourselves room to rebut all his other attacks? So let us take next the very person of God himself — or rather the shadow and phantom of him that we have in Christ — and let him be examined by the quality that is supposed to make him superior to the Creator. Unmistakable rules for testing God’s goodness will certainly come to hand. But my first business is to find and lay hold of the quality itself, and only then to draw it out into rules. [x]

Now when I survey the subject in terms of time, I nowhere catch sight of this goodness at the beginning of material existences, or at the start of those causes where it ought to have been found, going into action from there upon whatever had to be done. For death was there already, and sin, the sting of death, and that malice of the Creator too, against which the other god’s goodness ought to have stood ready to bring relief — meeting this as the primary rule of divine goodness, if it was to prove itself a natural property: to come as a rescue the moment the occasion for it began. For in God everything ought to be natural and inborn, exactly as his own condition is, so that it may be eternal, and not be reckoned as something accidental and from outside, and so as temporary and short of eternity. In God, then, goodness is required to be both perpetual and unbroken — the sort of thing that, stored up and kept ready in the treasury of his natural properties, goes ahead of its own causes and of the developments of matter; and, going ahead of them, takes every first material cause up on its own shoulders, instead of looking down on it from a distance and leaving it to itself.

In short, here too I must ask why his goodness did not operate from the beginning — a question no less pointed than the one we asked about the god himself, why he was not revealed from the very first. Why, then, did it not? He had to be revealed by his goodness, if he had any existence at all. That God should fail in power at all must not be thought, and still less that he should not discharge all his natural functions; for if these were held back from running their course they would stop being natural. And the nature of God himself knows nothing of idleness. Goodness, then, is rated by acting. It will be evident from this that no unwillingness to exercise his goodness at any time can be laid to his nature. Indeed, it is impossible that he should be unwilling on account of his nature, since that nature so directs itself that it would no longer exist if it stopped acting.

In Marcion’s god, however, goodness ceased from operating at some time or other. A goodness that could thus stop acting at any time was not natural, then, because natural properties do not admit of such a stop. And if it shall prove not to be natural, it must no longer be believed to be eternal, or fit for deity; because it cannot be eternal so long as, having failed to be natural, it neither supplies from the past nor guarantees for the future any means of keeping itself going. And in fact it did not exist from the beginning, and doubtless it will not last to the end; for it can fail to exist at some time to come, just as it has failed at some time past.

So, since the goodness of Marcion’s god failed at the beginning — for he did not deliver man from the first — that failure must have been the effect of will rather than of weakness. And a deliberate suppression of goodness will be found to have a malicious end in view. For what malice is so great as to be unwilling to do good when one can, or to torment what is useful, or to allow injury? The whole description of Marcion’s Creator, therefore, will have to be transferred to his new god’s account — the god who helped along the other’s cruelties by the delaying of his own goodness. For whoever has it in his power to prevent a thing from happening is held responsible for it if it does happen.

Man is condemned to death for tasting the fruit of one wretched little tree, and from there proceed sins with their penalties; and now all are perishing who never saw a single clod of Paradise. And all this your better god either knows nothing of, or else puts up with. Was it so that he might on this account be thought the better, and the Creator be reckoned all the worse? Even if that were his purpose he would be malicious enough, since he would be wanting both to load his rival with more disgrace by permitting his evil works to be done, and to keep the world harassed by the wrong.

What would you think of a doctor who encouraged a disease by withholding the remedy, and dragged out the danger by delaying his treatment, so that his cure might come dearer and be more talked about? That is the sentence to be pronounced against Marcion’s god: tolerant of evil, encouraging wrong, coaxing about his grace, playing false in his goodness — a goodness he did not display simply for its own sake, and which he must mean to display honestly, if he is good by nature and not by later acquisition, if he is supremely good in character and not by training, if he is God from eternity and not from Tiberius — or rather, to speak more truly, from Cerdon only, and Marcion. As things now stand, though, a god such as we have been considering would have been better suited to Tiberius, so that the goodness of the Divine Being might have been inaugurated in the world under his imperial sway!